Nepal has nearly tripled the numbers of tigers in the wild since 2010, officials said.
The number of Royal Bengal tigers increased to 355 in 2022 from 121 in 2009, according to the tiger population census findings made public on International Tiger Day on Friday. The tiger population increased by 120 since the last census in 2018 when total number was 235.
"The tiger census result shows that our conservation efforts are paying off. It's the result of coordinated efforts among all stakeholders including government agencies and the general public," Dil Bahadur Purja Pun, a spokesman for the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation, told dpa.
With the result, Nepal has surpassed its commitment to the highly ambitious 12-year goal set by the St Petersburg Tiger Summit in 2010 to double the global tiger population by 2022.
The growing tiger population has led to increased cases of human-wildlife conflict. At least 62 people have lost their lives in tiger attacks in the last three years, according to Kathmandu Post.
Thakur Bhandari, an activist associated with the Federation of Community Forestry Users in Nepal, said that the human-wildlife conflicts was becoming common due to Nepal's obsession with numbers. He said that the government was paying little attention to the capacity of its forests.
"Poor people, many of them from ingenious and excluded communities, are being forced to pay the price of Nepal's obsession in increasing the number of tigers. We need tigers but only as many as our forests allow us," said Bhandari.
Around 3,900 tigers are left in the wild globally, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
