It is early morning in late May in the hardwood sal forests of Rajaji Tiger Reserve, and the heat is already unbearable. By afternoon it will reach 39° Celsius. I am squatting on the forest floor beneath National Highway 72, listening to the steady, comforting rumble of commercial freight traffic above me, and I am exhausted. Not from the climate, mind you, but from the sheer, unbridled entitlement of the local fauna.
We are constantly told that India’s rising tiger numbers are a triumph. The conservationists are popping champagne because the population has rebounded. But success breeds complacency, and now, having been handed the gift of continued existence, these apex predators are demanding "pathways." They want dedicated corridors to cross our vital logistics arteries. Give them an inch of protected habitat, and they immediately start lobbying against infrastructure.
I recently had an off-the-record lunch with a consortium of supply-chain executives in New Delhi, and the frustration was palpable. We spent billions paving National Highway 72 to streamline the transport of essential consumer goods, and now we are expected to halt progress because a few hundred oversized cats have not learned to look both ways? It is a textbook example of anti-growth sentiment masquerading as biodiversity.
The logistics executives I dined with are the real heroes of the Indian economic miracle. They are the ones actually building the supply chain of tomorrow, while the tigers are entirely focused on the supply chain of the Pleistocene era. One CEO of a major freight conglomerate showed me the architectural renderings for a new elevated interchange over the Ganges, and it was a masterpiece of concrete efficiency. When I asked him if the environmental ministry had approved the clearances for wildlife disruption, he just sighed. The sheer regulatory burden of ensuring a predator does not get inconvenienced by a toll booth is driving vital domestic capital overseas.
It is profoundly disappointing to see the big cats refusing to adapt to the modern realities of the transit corridor.
Menon is entirely correct. We have provided the tigers with thousands of hectares of premium sal forest, yet they insist on wandering into the heavy-haul lanes. When a species refuses to optimize its own geographic footprint, that is a management failure, not an infrastructure crisis.
If we capitulate to the tigers’ demands for underpasses and safe crossings, we risk turning one of the region's most efficient commercial routes into a stranded asset. I pointed this out during a panel on sustainable logistics at COP last year, and the silence in the room was deafening. The international community simply refuses to acknowledge the economic burden of an apex predator that pays zero road tax.
If we are going to talk about sustainability, we need to look at the whole picture, including the tigers' scope-three emissions. Every time a tiger forces a commercial convoy to idle on the shoulder of NH72, they are actively increasing the diesel particulates in the atmosphere. The conservation lobby conveniently ignores this. The tigers are effectively holding our national emissions targets hostage because they refuse to detour around a designated freight zone. It is pure, unadulterated greenwashing—a public relations campaign designed to mask their absolute refusal to adapt.
We offered them a perfectly good culvert three miles down the road, but apparently, it does not align with their traditional hunting vectors. The inflexibility is staggering.
As predicted, the bleeding hearts will continue to demand that we retrofit our highways to accommodate the stubborn migratory habits of a species that frankly has not innovated in a million years. But I, for one, will not be apologizing for NH72. The tigers have had their numbers rebound. It is time they pulled their own weight and learned to use a crosswalk.