Sariska, 2004: The First Documented Collapse
By 2004, every tiger had been poached out of Sariska Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan. What followed was not silence, it was a slow, measurable unravelling. Sambar and chital populations, freed from predator pressure, expanded into areas they had previously avoided. Overgrazing stripped ground cover from sections of the reserve that had held dense understorey for decades. The dhok forest, already stressed by encroachment at the edges, lost regeneration in its interior. Sariska became the first Indian reserve to document, in real time, what ecologists call a trophic cascade: the chain reaction that moves through a food web when its controlling predator disappears.
