World Tourism Day 2026: How Maharashtra Is Expanding Its Tiger Tourism Footprint

In Nagpur, the safari season announces itself with scramble every year. What's easy to miss however is how much of what tourists come to see depends on the animals alone; while the effort local stakeholders have put into the ecotourism development around Maharashtra's tiger reserves goes unnoticed.

Tourism needs

The forest department at Tadoba indicated a tourism overhaul in order to enhance the experience and implement better management of safari operations. As Prabhu Nath Shukla, Field Director, Conservator of Forests (CCF), TATR Chandrapur puts it, “a new, user-friendly official website has been launched, providing comprehensive tourism-related information, including gate details and guidelines.” It is supported by an interactive 'Tiger Talk' chatbot to assist visitors. To improve transparency and awareness, “strict action has been taken against fraudulent activities, including the registration of FIRs against individuals involved in safari or cruiser booking scams”, Shukla noted.

Tourists opting for full-day safaris at specific core areas of the park are now allowed access to adjoining buffer zones. An online booking system has been introduced to streamline operations. TATR has eliminated camera charges and introduced a flexible add-on and replacement policy, and extended safari booking timings to up to two hours prior to entry.

Each safari vehicle carries 'Tadoba Diary' and brochures on birds and butterflies. Cashless payment systems and QR code-based feedback have been implemented. “We've also increased payments to guides and gypsy operators, and are working on Aadhaar OTP-based booking, better network connectivity at gates, and a waitlist system for buffer bookings,” Shukla added.

The push into buffer and peripheral zones is exactly what operators have been waiting for. Nikhil Abhyankar, who owns Taaru Vann, sees it changing the shape of the business itself. "For years, everything was built around the core, and the buffer was treated as a fallback. That's shifting now. Extending full-day access to buffer areas gives us a real product to sell. Guests are starting to book buffer stays on purpose, not by accident, and that spreads the tourism load and the income a lot more evenly across the region,” he noted.

Akshay Gajbhiye, Deputy Conservator of Forests and Deputy Director of Pench Tiger Reserve, sees the gains being expanded to other parks. “Both Umred and Pench are well endowed with natural biodiversity with the landscapes being beautiful and pristine. We have close to 32 lakes, so water has never been a problem in Umred Sanctuary,” he says.

The department has worked on improving the grasslands and meadows, giving a healthy herbivore population to grow in adequate numbers in both parks, which resulted in a good tiger population. “We recently concluded the All India Tiger Estimation and we're confident the numbers will show a marked improvement. We've also seen a strong upward trend in tourist numbers to both Pauni and Karhandla zones of the sanctuary,” Gajbhiye highlighted.

Translocations to yield

In December 2025, a Tadoba-bred tigress walked out of a soft-release enclosure in Chandoli National Park, inside the Sahyadri Tiger Reserve in the Western Ghats. She had been translocated from Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve as part of a larger relocation project and released into the core forest after showing strong hunting instincts during her enclosure phase. She joined another Tadoba tigress, Chanda, released a few months earlier in the same park. Officials said the pairing improved the odds of recovering the tiger population in that landscape. The transfer was part of a wider plan, cleared by the environment ministry, to move eight tigers from Tadoba and Pench to Sahyadri to revive the species' presence in the northern Western Ghats.

“A translocation like this is never decided on a whim”, Gajbhiye explains. “Any transfer requires prior approval from the National Tiger Conservation Authority, and within the state, it also goes through the Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (Wildlife). Once cleared, the choice of tiger itself is a research-heavy process. “Officials weigh the animal's age, its likely ability to survive in the new landscape, and how the herbivore density and topography at the receiving site match conditions here. Because the entire point of the exercise is to grow the tiger population at the destination, the tigress selected needs to have already proven herself as a mother”, he says.

Umred Karhandla functions as a reserve and a passageway, bounded by the Wainganga river and the Gosikhurd dam, linking Tadoba to Pench, Bor and Nagzira. Cubs born there tend to move on once they mature, dispersal being the reserve's main function. Koyna, folded into the Sahyadri Tiger Reserve alongside Chandoli, now carries some of that same weight as one of the newer frontiers this translocation programme is trying to build.

Community first approach

None of it works without the people. The photographer communities keep a watch on sightings on social media, so when a regular disappears from their territory too long or appears to be wounded, word moves fast, and the pressure that follows has more than once pushed the department to act. A forest officer on request of anonymity told us that the photography community sometimes works as an early warning system it didn't have to build.

However, this same appetite for closeness pushed authorities into banning mobile phones inside safari zones in 2018. In 2026, the Supreme Court made the ban national, and every other park has since followed TATR’s lead.