Every four years, India grades its tiger reserves on how well they are run. The sixth round adds a new test — what each reserve does with its own waste — and the results of the last round explain why it matters.
What was announced
On Friday, 25 September, Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav inaugurated the inception workshop for the sixth cycle of the Management Effectiveness Evaluation of Tiger Reserves (MEE-TR 2026) in New Delhi.
The exercise is run by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) in collaboration with the Wildlife Institute of India (WII). The technical manual for the 2026 cycle was released at the inaugural session, and Minister of State for Environment Kirti Vardhan Singh also attended, along with representatives of state forest departments and tiger reserve management teams.
This cycle will assess all 58 of India’s tiger reserves, the largest coverage in the exercise’s history.
Yadav used the occasion to call for combining scientific methods and technology with local ecological and socio-economic considerations, area-based assessment of human-wildlife conflict, and site-specific landscape management adapted to individual reserves. He suggested involving local ecological and sociological experts in evaluating MEE reports, and said local youth could participate in the exercise.
The new criterion: solid waste management
The headline change in the sixth cycle is that solid waste management is now scored as a separate evaluation criterion.
Evaluators will examine what reserves do with waste generated in three distinct settings:
- Forest chowkis — the outposts where field staff live and work, often deep inside the reserve with no municipal collection of any kind
- Tourism activities — packaging, bottles and food waste left behind by visitors along safari routes and at entry gates
- Wildlife rescue centres — including biomedical waste, which carries its own disposal requirements and cannot simply be buried or burnt
This is not a cosmetic addition. Waste inside a protected area is a wildlife management problem, not a housekeeping one. Food waste draws animals to roadsides, rest houses and tourist zones, habituating them to human presence and increasing the chance of conflict. Plastic gets ingested by wildlife and livestock. Improperly handled biomedical waste from a rescue centre is a disease risk to the animals being treated and to everything else in the vicinity.
How the evaluation works
MEE is not a new exercise. India has run it since 2006, at roughly four-year intervals, using a framework adapted from the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas.
It assesses six elements: context, planning, inputs, processes, outputs and outcomes, covering everything from the threats a reserve faces and the resources it has, through to whether its management is producing measurable conservation results.
Each reserve is visited by an independent, multidisciplinary expert team, which completes a scorecard after cross-checking supporting documents submitted by the Field Director.
The coverage has grown with the network itself:
| Cycle | Year | Reserves assessed |
|---|---|---|
| First | 2006 | 28 |
| Second | 2010 | 39 |
| Third | 2014 | 43 |
| Fourth | 2018 | 50 |
| Fifth | 2022 | 51 |
| Sixth | 2026 | 58 |
Beyond waste, the sixth cycle will cover tiger and prey conservation, habitat management, protection and wildlife crime, wildlife monitoring and health, fire and disaster management, human-wildlife coexistence, community engagement, tourism management, landscape connectivity, management planning and resource availability. The NTCA has said this round will place greater emphasis on field-based evidence, management outcomes, emerging threats, and digital and spatial information.
What the last report card actually said
This is the part missing from most coverage of Friday’s announcement, and it is the part that gives the new criterion its context.
The fifth cycle report was released at Corbett Tiger Reserve on Global Tiger Day, 29 July 2023, covering 51 of the then 53 tiger reserves. Reserves were assessed against 33 criteria, with scores pooled and converted into a percentage rating.
The overall mean score was 78.01%, with individual reserves ranging from 50% to 94%.
The grade distribution:
| Category | Score range | Number of reserves |
|---|---|---|
| Excellent | 90% and above | 12 |
| Very Good | 75–89% | 21 |
| Good | 60–74% | 13 |
| Fair | 50–59% | 5 |
Top performers: Periyar in Kerala led the country at around 94%, followed by Satpura in Madhya Pradesh and Bandipur in Karnataka.
Lowest scores: Dampa in Mizoram came last at 50%, followed by Indravati in Chhattisgarh and Nameri in Assam.
Among the original nine Project Tiger reserves, Manas scored 85.61%, Melghat 84.85%, Corbett 78.79%, Ranthambore 73.48% and Palamau 65.91%.
So while the average looks healthy, the spread is wide. Five reserves were rated Fair, the lowest band in use, and the gap between Periyar and Dampa is 44 percentage points.
The weakest link is not waste
Here is the finding that deserves more attention than it has received.
The fifth cycle identified climate change and carbon capture as the weakest-performing area across Indian tiger reserves, scoring just 60%, the lowest of any parameter in that cycle.
India is now adding a criterion on waste management, which is welcome and overdue. But the previous round already told the authorities where the network’s largest management gap lies, and it is not garbage. Whether the 2026 cycle shows improvement on climate parameters will be one of the more revealing things in the eventual report.
Why any of this matters beyond the paperwork
There is an obvious criticism of exercises like MEE: that they generate scores, reports and press events without changing conditions on the ground.
That criticism has some force, but it misses what the exercise uniquely provides. MEE is the only mechanism that produces publicly comparable, independently assessed performance data on every tiger reserve in the country. Without it, there is no way for a citizen, a journalist or a state legislator to know that Dampa is struggling while Periyar is excelling, or that climate action is the weakest area network-wide.
The value is not in the average. It is in the outliers, and in the year-on-year comparison. A reserve that scored 50% in 2022 and scores 50% again in 2026 is a reserve where four years of intervention achieved nothing, and that is a question somebody can be asked to answer.
The same will apply to waste. Once reserves are scored on it, there will be a documented baseline. What happens after that depends on whether anyone uses the numbers.
What to watch for
When the sixth cycle report eventually lands, the questions worth asking are:
- Did the five Fair-rated reserves improve? Dampa, Indravati and Nameri were at the bottom last time.
- Has the climate parameter moved off 60%?
- How badly do reserves score on the new waste criterion? A first-time measurement usually produces poor results, which is precisely what makes a baseline useful.
- Do the seven newly included reserves — those not covered in 2022 — start low, as newer reserves with less-established systems often do?
For now, 58 reserves are about to be visited by independent teams, and for the first time those teams will be looking at what the reserve does with its own waste.
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