PUNJAB HAD ZERO WILDLIFE-CRIME CASES. THEN RESEARCHERS PUT THE CRIMES ON A MAP.

Punjab is surrounded by landscapes of ecological importance, touches the Shivalik foothills, contains wetlands and rivers, and sits astride major urban and transport corridors. Yet a 2012 review by Velho et al. reported an absence of documented hunting, poaching, bushmeat or wildlife-trade crimes in Punjab.

Then, in August 2024, another striking number appeared in the news.

Zero.

According to Wildlife Crime Control Bureau data reported by The Tribune, Punjab had recorded no wildlife-crime cases between 2019 and 2023, while hundreds of cases had been recorded across other northern jurisdictions covered by the report.

At first glance, Punjab seemed almost absent from the wildlife-crime map.

But perhaps the story was not one of absence. Perhaps the evidence was simply scattered.

Individual incidents had appeared in newspapers and official and enforcement records, but there was no consolidated picture of what they collectively revealed about Punjab. That changed when wildlife researchers Navdeep Sood and Rohan Kumar brought the scattered evidence together and examined the emerging pattern.

When The Evidence Came Together

Their study, published in the Journal of Threatened Taxa in March 2026, brought together reported wildlife-crime incidents in Punjab from 2019 to 2024. The resulting picture was dramatically different from the apparent blankness of the earlier record.

The study documented 32 reported incidents affecting thousands of wild animals and involving an extraordinary variety of species and wildlife products, including wild boar, leopards, tigers, sambar, Tibetan antelopes, freshwater turtles, birds and marine wildlife.

Then the researchers put the incidents on a map.

And the map changed the story.

Suddenly, Punjab did not look like a blank space.

It looked like an emerging geography of wildlife crime.

A Farm State, A Wildlife-Crime Story

And that is where the story becomes particularly surprising.

Punjab is one of India’s least-forested States, with forest cover of less than 3.6% of its geographical area. Its identity is overwhelmingly agrarian, shaped by farms, villages, cities, roads and intensive human activity. Yet the study found a concentrated wildlife-crime pattern within this human-dominated landscape.

The assumption that wildlife crime belongs primarily to deep forests suddenly looks incomplete.

Wildlife That Should Not Have Been There

But perhaps the most revealing evidence came from wildlife that does not naturally belong in Punjab at all.

The study recorded marine wildlife products in the landlocked State, including sea fans and corals. It also documented bear bile, lizard oil, exotic parrots and other wildlife derivatives. Tiger derivatives were recorded even though Punjab is not a tiger-range State.

These are not merely stories about animals being hunted locally.

They hint at something larger: movement.

A landlocked agricultural State was therefore appearing in a story that stretched from local wildlife exploitation to long-distance trafficking.

The Geography Behind The Crime

The paradox is difficult to miss.

Punjab does not have the vast forests that dominate the popular imagination of wildlife crime. What it does have is connectivity: a dense human landscape, major cities, transport networks and an international border. The study suggests that these features may intersect with the observed clustering of wildlife-crime reports.

This does not mean that every part of Punjab has suddenly become a wildlife-crime zone, nor does the study claim to measure the total amount of wildlife crime occurring in the State. Its findings are based on reported incidents, and the researchers acknowledge that reporting and detection biases remain important limitations.

But that caution makes the central finding more, rather than less, interesting.

A State does not need to be covered in forests to become important in the geography of wildlife crime.

From Isolated Cases To A Landscape

For years, the apparent story was that Punjab had little or no documented wildlife crime.

Now there is a map showing that the available evidence is not simply a collection of isolated cases. It reveals a pattern of concentration.

The question is no longer simply whether wildlife crime occurs in Punjab. The more revealing question is why particular places repeatedly appear when the scattered evidence is assembled.

That shift—from isolated incidents to a landscape—is the real contribution of the study.

Why The Story Travelled

It also helps explain why the research travelled so quickly beyond the scientific community. Published in the Journal of Threatened Taxa, the study was subsequently reported by The Hindu and other media outlets, while its findings were picked up by civil-services and current-affairs platforms.

A study about an overlooked wildlife problem in Punjab had become contemporary-affairs material for a much wider audience.

Perhaps that wider interest comes from the uncomfortable paradox at the heart of the findings.

The wildlife may come from elsewhere. The products may travel across States. The networks may cross borders. And the critical points may lie not in wilderness, but in the ordinary human landscape through which people and commodities move every day.

Jigyasa Sood

Wildlifer • Musician

Student; Writer.

Navdeep Sood and Rohan Kumar

Wildlife Researchers • Spatial Analysis & Conservation

Wildlife researchers and authors of the study examining the spatial pattern of reported wildlife-crime incidents in Punjab.