One hundred and forty-nine leopards died across Madhya Pradesh between January 2025 and the following fourteen months — a figure that has drawn sharp criticism from wildlife activists and raised pointed questions about the adequacy of protections for India's most widely distributed large cat. The data, obtained through a Right to Information query filed by activist Ajay Dube, puts a precise number on what conservationists have long warned: leopards in India face mounting, often man-made, threats that official frameworks have yet to adequately address.

Roads as the Leading Cause of Death

The Forest Department's own accounting is telling. Accidents caused the largest share of leopard deaths, with road incidents alone responsible for 31 percent of fatalities. Of those, 19 deaths occurred on highways — arterial roads that cut through or border forest corridors where leopards regularly move. Unlike tigers, which are largely confined to core protected zones, leopards are highly adaptable and range widely across fragmented landscapes, farmland edges, and human settlements. That adaptability, once considered their strength, now places them at disproportionate risk from infrastructure that expands with little consideration for wildlife movement.

Highway mortality is not a problem unique to Madhya Pradesh. Across India, road and rail networks have expanded rapidly into biodiversity-rich zones, and the absence of sufficient wildlife crossings — underpasses, overpasses, or fenced corridors — means large mammals regularly attempt to cross active traffic. Leopards, being largely nocturnal and solitary, are particularly vulnerable to night-time collisions on high-speed roads.

The Dispute Over "Acceptable" Mortality

Forest Department officials stated that a four percent mortality rate falls within acceptable limits — a claim Dube has challenged as alarming. The tension between these two positions reflects a broader disagreement in wildlife management: whether population-level statistics can justify individual losses, particularly for a species already under pressure from habitat fragmentation, retaliatory killings, and poaching for body parts used in illegal trade.

Leopards are listed as Vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List, and India holds a significant share of the global wild population. Madhya Pradesh, with its extensive forest cover and network of wildlife reserves, is among the more important leopard habitats in the country. Sustained mortality at the rate this data suggests — across all causes, not road accidents alone — warrants more than reassurance that figures are within a statistical threshold. It demands a transparent breakdown of how those thresholds were established, and what population size they are calculated against.

What the Data Does Not Yet Tell Us

RTI-derived figures carry an important caveat: they capture reported deaths. Leopard mortalities in remote areas, or cases involving poison or snares where carcasses are not recovered, may not appear in official tallies. Conservationists working across central India have consistently noted that unreported deaths — particularly retaliatory killings near agricultural zones where leopards prey on livestock — are a significant blind spot in mortality assessments. The true toll may be higher than the RTI data reflects.

The Forest Department's acknowledgment that efforts are underway to reduce fatalities is encouraging as a statement of intent, but specifics matter. Effective intervention requires identifying which road segments account for the highest collision rates, installing deterrents and early-warning systems on those stretches, and enforcing speed limits in wildlife-sensitive zones after dark. It also requires addressing the human-wildlife conflict dimension — supporting livestock insurance and compensation mechanisms that reduce the incentive for retaliatory killing.

A Canary in the Landscape

Leopards, because of their wide range and close contact with human-dominated environments, function as an indicator of how well India's conservation infrastructure actually performs at the edges — not inside protected core zones, but in the buffer areas and unclassified forests where most wildlife mortality occurs. When nearly 150 of them die in fourteen months in a single state, the number is not just a statistic about one species. It is a signal about road planning, land-use policy, conflict resolution, and the gap between conservation declarations and on-the-ground reality. Dube's RTI filing has forced that signal into public view. What follows depends on whether officials treat it as a problem to be managed or a pattern to be changed.