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A male tiger has been photographed by camera traps in Dihing Patkai National Park in eastern Assam, giving scientific confirmation of tiger presence in a rainforest park that is not a tiger reserve.
The monitoring exercise was carried out by the Zoological Survey of India along with the Margherita West Forest Range of the Digboi Forest Division.
Forest staff had earlier found pug marks pointing to a tiger moving through the area; the photographic record settles what the tracks only suggested.
Assam's Environment and Forests Minister Jayanta Mallabaruah announced the record, calling it a rare moment for the state's rainforest landscape and crediting sustained patrolling by field staff.
Dihing Patkai spans 231.65 sq km across the Dibrugarh and Tinsukia districts and protects India's largest surviving stretch of tropical lowland rainforest.
A camera trap is a weatherproof camera fired by a motion or heat sensor, left in the forest for weeks at a time. Because every tiger carries a unique stripe pattern, photographs of both flanks let researchers identify individuals and apply capture-recapture statistics - the same animal photographed at different stations over time yields an estimate of how many animals were never photographed at all. This is the method underlying the All India Tiger Estimation, run every four years by the National Tiger Conservation Authority with the Wildlife Institute of India, whose 2022 cycle put India's tiger population at 3,682 and which holds a Guinness record for the largest camera-trap wildlife survey.
Simple Analogy: A pug mark is like a footprint at a crime scene - it proves someone walked past. A camera-trap photograph is the CCTV still: it shows who, and the stripe pattern serves as the fingerprint that tells one individual from another.
Premier national body for the survey and documentation of India's animal life; conducted the camera-trap monitoring here
Statutory body under the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972 that oversees Project Tiger and approves tiger reserve notifications
Autonomous research institute that partners the NTCA on the All India Tiger Estimation
Declared the Dehing Patkai Wildlife Sanctuary
Assam government announces the upgrade of the sanctuary to national park status
Formally notified as a national park, becoming Assam's seventh
Sikhna Jwhwlao notified as Assam's eighth national park, taking the state's tally to eight
Camera-trap record of a male tiger in Dihing Patkai announced by the state environment minister
Dihing Patkai lies in the extreme east of Assam, where the Brahmaputra valley narrows against the Patkai hills on the Myanmar frontier. The Dehing river, which gives the park its name, drains this belt into the Brahmaputra. Namdapha, in neighbouring Arunachal Pradesh, is a national park and tiger reserve in the same broad forest belt, and Dibru-Saikhowa National Park lies to the north across the Brahmaputra.
GS Paper 3 > Conservation, environmental pollution and degradation; GS Paper 1 > Physical geography of India
General Awareness > National parks, wildlife sanctuaries and current affairs
"Project Tiger" was launched in India in which year?
Answer: 1973
Motion-triggered camera left in the field to photograph wildlife; the basis of individual identification in tiger estimation
Footprint impression of a big cat; indirect evidence of presence, weaker than a photographic record
Tropical rainforest dominated by trees of the Dipterocarpaceae family, of which Hollong is the characteristic Assamese example
Area notified under Project Elephant for the protection of elephants and their corridors; Dehing Patkai is one such reserve
Statistical method that estimates a population from repeated detections of identifiable individuals