Broken Corridors

India likes to celebrate its growing tiger population as one of conservation’s great success stories. But tigers survive and thrive because their habitats remain connected. Fragmenting those forests entails risks for thriving tiger populations. The decision to grant an in-principle wildlife clearance for a third railway line through the Satpura-Melghat tiger corridor carries with it precisely that risk.

The proposed railway line between Jujharpur and Chichonda cuts through one of central India’s most critical wildlife landscapes, linking the Satpura and Melghat tiger reserves and forming part of the larger Satpura-Pench-Melghat landscape. This corridor is a biological highway, allowing tigers and other wildlife to disperse, breed and maintain healthy genetic diversity.

The Standing Committee of the National Board for Wildlife has insisted that mitigation measures such as wildlife overpasses be scientifically designed and reviewed before implementation. Yet the clearance itself exposes an unsettling contradiction. The committee’s own inspection found that the proposed 34 wildlife overpasses were based largely on field observations and mortality records rather than rigorous scientific assessment. Detailed engineering designs are still absent. Importantly, the comprehensive landscape study by the State Forest Research Institute, Jabalpur, is still awaited.

The approval has been granted before the study is in. This reverses the basic principle that should govern projects in ecologically sensitive landscapes. Scientific evidence must guide approvals, not merely refine them after the fact. Once a project gathers administrative momentum, conditions often become exercises in compliance rather than conservation. There have been far too many examples where mitigation structures were inadequately designed, poorly located or inconsistently monitored, leaving wildlife to bear the consequences.

The danger extends beyond tigers. The Satpura-Melghat landscape supports leopards, sloth bears, wild dogs, gaur and countless smaller species that depend on uninterrupted forests. Railways have already emerged as a significant source of wildlife mortality across India. Faster trains, higher traffic density and expanding rail infrastructure multiply these risks, especially where animal movement corridors intersect transport networks.

None of this argues against development. India’s expanding economy requires better freight movement and modern transport infrastructure. But development ceases to be sustainable when it treats ecological safeguards as hurdles instead of foundations. While a railway can be built, a forest corridor, once fragmented, cannot simply be reconstructed through concrete overpasses and engineering optimism.

India has spent decades and enormous public resources restoring tiger habitats and expanding protected areas. Allowing critical corridors to shrink through piecemeal clearances would squander those gains.

The Satpura-Melghat corridor is the artery through which one of India’s finest wildlife landscapes continues to breathe. That said, if the government gets the balance between development and conversation right, this project could well become a model for reconciling economic ambition with ecological responsibility.