Corbett Tiger Poaching: CBI Names Officers, State Says Nothing Happened

Corbett Tiger Poaching: The Tigers That Died Twice in Uttarakhand

In the forests of Uttarakhand, tigers were skinned, their bones seized, their death records falsified by the very officials meant to protect them, and at least 40 of them died in just two and a half years — a figure so alarming it shocked a High Court bench into calling in the Central Bureau of Investigation.

But this is not just a story about dead tigers. It is a story of how institutions meant to protect India’s wildlife—the forest department, the state government and the courts—looked away, closed files, transferred officers, or filed affidavits saying all was well. It is a story that strikes at the heart of Project Tiger, India's most celebrated conservation programme, launched in 1973 at Corbett itself — the very reserve at the centre of this scandal.

Project Tiger has been held up for decades as proof that India can save its wildlife. The numbers have been cited triumphantly: 178 tigers in Uttarakhand in 2006, growing to 560 by 2022. The State of Uttarakhand quotes these very figures in its April 2026 Supreme Court filing as evidence of conservation success. What those numbers do not say is this — that while the count was rising, tigers were allegedly being skinned in the Haridwar range, their bones seized by a Special Task Force, their death records backdated on the directions of forest officials, their bodies burned without following the National Tiger Conservation Authority's own mandatory protocols, and the one agency that began to uncover all of this was stopped from investigating the case within 26 days.

India has spent decades and thousands of crores telling the world it is saving the tiger. In the forests of Uttarakhand, if the CBI’s findings are to be believed, tiger poaching killed the animal twice—once by the poacher and once by the paperwork.

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The Rarest of Rare Case — And the Stay That Buried It

The story, as far as the courts are concerned, begins in 2018 — though the tiger poaching and deaths had been happening for years before. That year, a startling claim was placed before the Uttarakhand High Court: that in just two and a half years, 40 tigers and 272 leopards had died in the state. The claim came through an intervention application filed by the Gram Panchayat of Dhikuli — a village sitting at the edge of the Corbett landscape — whose lawyer placed before the court the names of active poachers operating in the state, including individuals from the Bawariya criminal tribe of Haryana.

The High Court bench of Acting Chief Justice Rajiv Sharma and Justice Lok Pal Singh were alarmed. The state's own affidavits, the court noted, were "sketchy, evasive and least to say misleading at times."

On 4 September 2018, the High Court passed a landmark order — one that would set in motion a chain of events. Calling the matter "the rarest of rare cases where the expertise of the CBI is solicited," the court directed the Central Bureau of Investigation to hold a preliminary enquiry into all cases of poaching in Uttarakhand in the last five years, find the complicity of serving forest officials, and submit a sealed report within three months.

Within ten days, that order was challenged. D.S. Khati — the retired Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (Wildlife) and Chief Wildlife Warden of Uttarakhand, the most senior wildlife official the state had at the time of the alleged cover-ups — filed a Special Leave Petition before the Supreme Court on 14 September 2018 arguing that the CBI should not investigate the case.

Khati was not a bystander in this story. He was the officer who had presided over Uttarakhand's forest department — including the Corbett Tiger Reserve — during the years the tiger poaching and deaths allegedly occurred. And now he was the officer rushing to the Supreme Court to stop the investigation. His argument, in essence, was this: the High Court had acted improperly, the CBI had no business investigating, and the High Court order should be stayed.

26 Days of Truth, Eight Years of Silence

But before that stay landed, the CBI had already begun. On 26 September 2018, the agency registered a Preliminary Enquiry — formally launching its investigation into unknown officers and officials of the Forest Department of Uttarakhand. The CBI's wildlife crime unit along with officers from the Economic Offences divisions formed multiple teams and fanned out across the state's forest divisions: Haridwar, Almora, Chidiyapur, Gohari and others — the same divisions where Corbett tigers had allegedly been poached, skinned and their deaths buried in falsified paperwork. What they found was deeply disturbing. But even before the investigation could be completed, the Supreme Court froze the CBI's probe.

The CBI later filed an application before the Supreme Court in July 2023 seeking to vacate the stay, warning that evidence was at risk of being destroyed and that the inquiry remained critically incomplete.

The agency had examined 179 persons and scrutinised thousands of pages of documents in just 26 days — and said it had found enough to know that more lay buried. The Supreme Court did not decide the application.

Then, in April 2026 — eight years after the stay was granted — the State of Uttarakhand walked into court with fresh papers arguing that the CBI inquiry was unwarranted, that it would "undermine the morale of field staff" and, most remarkably, that it would create "unnecessary mental and social stress for retired officers." The tigers, presumably, could wait.

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What the CBI Found in 26 Days

What the CBI found in 26 days should have been enough to keep investigators busy for years. Across multiple forest divisions in Uttarakhand, the agency examined 179 persons — forest officials, police officials, private persons and accused poachers — and scrutinised thousands of pages of documents.

What emerged was not the picture of isolated, accidental tiger deaths that the forest department had been presenting to the courts. It was something far more deliberate. In case after case, the CBI found that the machinery designed to record, investigate and prevent tiger poaching had been systematically subverted from within.

The most explosive finding concerned the official death records themselves.

Then there was the case of the female tiger found dead in Shyampur, Haridwar Range in May 2018 — Range Case RC-17. A complaint had reached the Forest Minister of Uttarakhand directly, reporting the poaching of not one but two tigers in the area. The Minister forwarded the complaint to the concerned Divisional Forest Officer for verification.

What the DFO sent back, the CBI found, was a false report — one that concealed the death of the second tiger entirely. The CBI's finding was unambiguous: there had been a deliberate attempt by forest officials to cover up the death of another tiger. The crucial facts on record had not been explored. The Corbett Tiger Reserve landscape was losing tigers, and the officials entrusted with their protection were, according to the CBI, ensuring those deaths disappeared from the record.

A third case — Range Case RC-44, registered in Chidiyapur in February 2017 — told a similar story. A tiger body had been found during routine patrolling at Koshwali Beat in Haridwar. The forest department investigated, found nothing, and closed the case. When the CBI looked at the same case, it found that necessary documentation had simply not been done. The incineration panchnama — the official record of the burning of the tiger's body, a mandatory step under National Tiger Conservation Authority guidelines designed specifically to prevent the pilferage of tiger skins — did not contain even the basic details of when the incineration took place.

Running through all of these cases was a single, devastating thread — the complete and systematic violation of the National Tiger Conservation Authority's own protocols for handling tiger and leopard deaths. These protocols exist for one reason: to ensure that when a tiger dies, its skin cannot be harvested and sold. They require incineration in the presence of senior officials, photography, video recording, preservation of viscera and its dispatch to the Wildlife Institute of India for examination.

The CBI found that across the Corbett region and beyond — in Haridwar, Almora, Chidiyapur — these protocols had been ignored case after case, year after year. The conclusion the CBI drew was stark: had proper investigation been conducted in these cases, it would have led to tracking the role of bigger players involved in the tiger poaching network. Instead, the lack of sincere and effective investigation, in the CBI's own words, "might have caused injustice."

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The State Defends Corbett. The Documents Tell Another Story.

When the State of Uttarakhand filed its counter affidavit before the Supreme Court in April 2026, it arrived with a confident central argument: that Corbett Tiger Reserve and the broader Uttarakhand landscape represent one of India's greatest conservation achievements. The State told the court that tiger numbers rose from 178 in 2006 to 560 in 2022, making it the third largest population in India, as per the National Tiger Conservation Authority.

The CBI's own preliminary findings — drawn from range cases registered during the very years the State cites as its conservation triumph — found tiger skins and bones seized in Haridwar, death records falsified, and a tiger death concealed from the Forest Minister himself. Using rising tiger numbers to claim there was no poaching is misleading, as the court had earlier said about the State’s affidavits.

The State also leans on a geographical argument. It quotes an NTCA affidavit filed before the High Court stating that the 2016 tiger poaching incident occurred "at the border of the Lansdowne Forest Division and the Corbett Tiger Reserve" — not within Corbett Tiger Reserve's territorial limits per se — and that the tigers involved were dispersing individuals. This is presented as a defence of Corbett's management. But the NTCA's own statement confirms that tiger poaching did occur — it merely disputes the exact location.

The State then tells the court that since 2019, no cases of tiger poaching have been reported in Corbett or Rajaji Tiger Reserve — evidence, it argues, that its strengthened protection measures, new chowkis, drones, e-surveillance towers and a Special Operations Group, have worked. What this argument cannot answer is the CBI's central finding: that the forest department's own system for recording tiger deaths had been compromised.

The H-2 proforma — the foundational document through which tiger deaths are reported — was found falsified on the directions of officials who were named by the CBI. If the recording system was deliberately corrupted, the absence of reported tiger poaching cases proves nothing. The State cannot simultaneously argue that its record-keeping is reliable enough to prove tiger poaching has stopped, while the CBI has found that the same record-keeping was intentionally falsified.

The State also attacks the credibility of Rajiv Mehta — the NGO head whose complaints helped bring the matter to court — revealing that his organisation received ₹1.34 crore from foreign donors for conservation work in the Corbett-Rajaji landscape without the required permission from the Chief Wildlife Warden, and failed to furnish utilisation details despite repeated notices.

His complaints, the State argues, are therefore "motivated, retaliatory, and lack credibility." But this argument has a structural flaw the State appears not to notice. Even if every allegation against Mehta were true, it would have no bearing on what the CBI found independently.

Perhaps the most remarkable passage in the April 2026 filing is its closing argument. The State tells the Supreme Court that allowing the CBI to resume its inquiry would "undermine the morale of field staff working in harsh conditions," create "unnecessary mental and social stress for retired officers," and produce a false narrative about the failure of wildlife conservation in Uttarakhand.

It is, in essence, an argument that the feelings of forest officials should be weighed against accountability for Corbett tiger poaching. The CBI found prima facie connivance of forest officials with poachers, falsified tiger death records, a cover-up that reached the Forest Minister's office, and systematic violation of NTCA protocols across multiple forest divisions over multiple years.

The State's answer to all of this, filed eight years after the inquiry was frozen, is that completing the investigation would be stressful for retired officers.

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Eight Years of Silence. The Poachers Are Still Out There.

The CBI's own preliminary findings pointed to bigger players behind the tiger poaching network — the kind of organised wildlife crime mafia that state agencies, however well-intentioned, are structurally ill-equipped to dismantle alone.

If poachers do not fear the CBI, they will not fear the state forest department, the Special Task Force or the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau. The eight-year freeze has not just delayed justice — it has actively emboldened those who profit from India's most protected animal.

The responsibility for what has happened in Uttarakhand's forests does not rest with one officer or one department alone. India's tiger conservation architecture involves some of its most powerful institutions — the National Tiger Conservation Authority, which sets the protocols that were allegedly violated; the Wildlife Institute of India, whose forensic science confirmed the seized skins were tiger skins; the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau, whose mandate is precisely the kind of organised poaching network the CBI was beginning to unravel; and the Supreme Court of India itself, whose stay order has functioned for eight years as an institutional shield for the accused.

Each of these bodies has a founding purpose rooted in the protection of the tiger — an animal that India has spent fifty years and thousands of crores of public money trying to save.

Author:   Prema Sridevi

Corbett tiger poaching: 40 tigers dead, skins and bones seized, officials named for faking death records; 8 years later, State tells court nothing is wrong.

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Tiger Animals