The fifth-cycle Management Effectiveness Evaluation report published in 2023 assigns Rajaji Tiger Reserve a score of 68.94 per cent, graded Good. This page reads the report itself to ask a narrower question: what does that score measure, what does the report leave unscored for this reserve, and which of its own labels do not line up. It is a reading of a published audit, dated throughout, and it draws no conclusion about the ecological condition of the reserve, because a management effectiveness score is not an ecological verdict.
Sources used, all checked on 24 October 2026: the National Tiger Conservation Authority, Management Effectiveness Evaluation of Tiger Reserves in India, fifth cycle, published in 2023, which records the field visit to this reserve from 7 to 9 September 2022; and, as a supporting document for repeat findings, the authority’s Bridging the Gap: Unveiling Effectiveness of India’s Tiger Reserve Management, publication year 2024. The staff, plan and weed questions raised in the same report are handled in our forest staff roles article, our invasive weeds evidence page and our research and monitoring article, and are not rehashed here.
What the score is made of
The framework is the IUCN one, applied to tiger reserves across six elements: context, planning, input, process, output and outcomes, in the sequence that runs from where a reserve stands now, through what is planned and what resources exist, to what was done and what changed. For each element the report defines criteria, giving 33 criteria or indicators in total for the whole assessment. Scoring worked response by response: the evaluators could choose one response for each indicator, each response carried a score from 2.5 to 10, where 2.5 was the lowest effectiveness and rated poor, 5 was average and rated fair, 7.5 was below optimal and rated good, and 10 was optimal and rated very good. The scores of all 33 indicators were then pooled for each of the 51 reserves and converted into a percentage of the maximum possible score, and that percentage was graded: 50 to 59 per cent as Fair, 60 to 74 as Good, 75 to 89 as Very Good and 90 and above as Excellent. The report notes that the Excellent band was introduced in this cycle by splitting what earlier cycles called Very Good, and that care was taken to keep the categories comparable across cycles.
Against that scale, Rajaji is printed at 68.94 per cent, which lands in the Good band, from a field visit of 7 to 9 September 2022 by three named evaluators. In the report table that lists all 51 reserves in descending order of score, from 94.53 at the top to 50.00 at the foot, Rajaji appears at serial 40. That is the whole of the headline result, and it is worth stating what kind of thing it is: an assessment of management process and systems, conducted on one visit, supported by a self-assessment form and documents submitted between July 2022 and February 2023. It is not a survey of animals, not a measure of forest condition and not a score for the landscape around the reserve.
What the report does not publish for this reserve
The most useful thing a reader can take from this document is an absence. The report says a detailed matrix was developed and included as part of the assessment to make scoring more objective after assigning differential weightages to different criteria and indicators, and it prints the list of 33 criteria. It does not print the weightage attached to any individual criterion. Its element-wise results are published as aggregates across the 51 reserves, with Context highest at 81.37 per cent for the fifth cycle and Input lowest at 72.75 per cent, and with individual reserves named only where they topped an element, such as Satpura and Simlipal in Context or Mudumalai in Outcomes. No element score, no indicator score, no sub-score and no weightage specific to Rajaji appears in the report, as checked on 24 October 2026.
The consequence is arithmetic as well as editorial. Without the element scores or the weights, 68.94 cannot be broken apart from what is published or traced to any particular weakness. Anyone quoting a component figure for Rajaji is quoting something the report does not contain. What the report does give for context is a cycle history: tiger reserves were evaluated in 2006 across 28 reserves, 2010 across 39, 2014 across 43, 2018 across 50 and 2022 across 51, and its ratings table places Rajaji at Fair in 2018 and Good in 2022, with no rating before that because the reserve was declared in 2015. The table gives bands, not a like-for-like numerical score trend for Rajaji across those cycles.
Three findings the score does not represent
Forest cover. The second management weakness states that the tiger reserve has lost nearly 30 km2 of forest cover in 10 years as per the India State of Forest Report 2021, and then says the management has not investigated and ascertained the reason for this, which the report reads as indicating that the threat of encroachment and habitat loss is increasing. An immediate actionable point adds that the ISFR 2021 report rings an alarm bell, that carbon sequestration potential is on a downward trajectory, and that management must reverse the trend. The 2024 compilation repeats the point as a loss of approximately 30 km2 in the last decade requiring immediate intervention. Both statements are anchored to a 2021 forest report and a 2022 visit, and the notable part is not the number but the sentence about the cause not having been investigated, because that is a documented gap in the record rather than an inference drawn here.
The BHEL lands. Both a weakness and an immediate actionable point, printed twice in the same section, state that the BHEL lands on the fringes of the reserve near Haridwar town are in the eco-sensitive zone and are largely remaining unutilised, that there is no tree growth in that patch of land, that the state can impose prohibitions on utilising the land for buildings and infrastructure, and that the best course would be to use the land for growing trees. It is an unusual entry because it concerns land at the edge of the reserve rather than its core, and the recommendation is addressed to the state. The report does not describe who manages the land or record any decision on the recommendation, and this article records neither.
Core-area tourism. An immediate actionable point states that tourists are allowed to stay in the core area of the reserve and spend the night, and that the night halts in the core area as well as the movement of safari vehicles in the core area must be phased out. This is the clearest sentence in the report about how visitors move inside the reserve, and it is advice given after a September 2022 visit. The report does not record the recommendation being taken up, and this article does not present it as a rule in force, as a closure or as a change a visitor should expect. Anyone planning a drive should read it as an evaluation point with a date attached.
Repeat findings, and how the two documents date them
The 2024 compilation exists to line findings up across cycles, and its Rajaji chapter is built as a table with columns for the MEE year, the weaknesses and actionable points identified, the subsequent non-compliance over the years till 2022, and recommendations from the All India Tiger Estimation. In its 2018 row, the non-compliance column records that delayed fund release and weak daily patrolling contributed to protection challenges, and separately that protection challenges persisted due to delayed fund release and inadequate daily patrolling. The 2022 row then records delays and insufficient fund releases by the authority and the state government as requiring urgent attention. That is the same subject appearing first as a gap recorded between cycles and then as a finding of the 2022 visit, and it is the clearest documented repeat in the pair of documents, which is why the funding question is taken up in our Project Tiger funding ledger.
The compilation is useful precisely because it labels findings from prior cycles and subsequent non-compliance separately. That structure prevents a reader from mistaking a 2018 observation for a condition measured in 2022, or either one for a present-day status. This page reports the dates attached to the findings and does not treat a table of non-compliance as a current condition.
Where the report’s own labels disagree
A reader quoting a rank or a cluster from this document should know that different sections attach different numbers to the same reserve. In the descending score table Rajaji is serial 40 of 51, which is the ranking used on this page. In the report’s list of tiger reserves with their areas it is numbered 48. In the contents list of reserves and in the heading of its own chapter it is 49. The report does not explain the difference; only the score table is ordered by score.
Cluster labelling is looser still. Table 2.2, listing the ten independent regional expert committees in five clusters, puts Rajaji under team 1a alongside Corbett, Melghat, Dudhwa and Pilibhit. Table 3.2 prints the same five reserves as Cluster 1A with a mean score of 77.27. The narrative paragraph that introduces the cluster results writes that in Cluster one Pench reported the highest score of 90.15 per cent whereas Rajaji received the lowest of 68.94, while the table beneath it prints 90.91 for Pench, which sits in Cluster 1B, and prints 90.15 for Simlipal in Cluster 3B. The figure describing the same results labels the five groups Landscape Cluster I to V, and the landscape complex table numbers its rows I, II, II, IV and V, with no III. Membership of the group that evaluated Rajaji is consistent across the tables. The labels, the narrative and the serials are not. This page reports them as printed, takes no meaning from the inconsistencies, and does not treat them as affecting the score itself.
What this page deliberately does not say
- It makes no ecological verdict. A management effectiveness percentage grades process and systems as assessed in September 2022. It does not grade habitat, biodiversity, tiger numbers or the trend of either.
- It publishes no current figure for forest cover, no update to the ISFR 2021 statement and no cause for the recorded loss, because the report itself says the reason was not ascertained.
- It claims no implementation of any recommendation, including the phasing out of night halts and core-area vehicle movement and the treatment of the BHEL lands.
- It gives no current staffing, plan or foundation position and no weed treatment status, because those subjects are already carried with their own dates in the linked articles and repeating them here would blur two records into one.
- It publishes no element, indicator or weightage figure for this reserve, since none is in the report.
- It treats every historical assessment as dated: 2018 and 2022 ratings, a 2021 forest report, a 2022 field visit, a 2023 publication and a 2024 compilation are five different points in time.
Why the distinction matters when a number is quoted at you
The score is a real published result and it is useful for one thing: comparing management processes across 51 reserves on a single defined scale in a single cycle. It stops being useful the moment it is used as a verdict on the reserve, as a trend without the other cycle, or as a breakdown that the report never published. When the figure appears in a post, a slide or a briefing, the three questions that settle it are which cycle and which visit date, which of the four bands the percentage falls in, and whether the person quoting it can also show the element behind the number. For the funding side of the same report, including its sentence on delayed and inadequate releases, our funding ledger article sets out the release and sanction documents; for the staffing figures that the same evaluation carries, who runs Rajaji handles them with their 2022 context; and for the wider question of how numbers about this reserve are produced and read, our research and monitoring article remains the reference, while myths and facts covers the habit of turning a grade into a story.
Rajaji management evaluation questions answered
What does the 68.94 per cent score for Rajaji mean, and what does it not mean?
It means that the independent evaluation team that visited the reserve from 7 to 9 September 2022, named in the report as Sh. Brij Kishore Singh, Sh. Surendra Kumar and Dr. Salvador Lyngdoh, scored the reserve on 33 criteria across six elements of the IUCN management effectiveness framework, pooled those responses into a percentage, and the report published that percentage as 68.94, which falls in the 60 to 74 per cent band the report labels Good. In the report table ranking all 51 reserves by score, Rajaji appears at serial 40. It is a measure of management effectiveness as assessed on one visit in September 2022, and it is not a measure of habitat condition, wildlife abundance or ecological health. This article makes no ecological verdict out of it.
Does the report show how Rajaji scored element by element?
No, and this article publishes no such breakdown. The report states that a detailed matrix with differential weightages was used to make scoring objective, but it does not print the weightage attached to any indicator. Its element-wise results are given as aggregates for the 51 reserves, with Context at 81.37 per cent, Planning at 80.88, Input at 72.75, Process at 76.31, Output at 79.17 and Outcomes at 75.59 for the fifth cycle, and with individual reserves named only where they were top performers in an element. No element score, indicator score, sub-score or weightage for Rajaji was located in the report as checked on 24 October 2026, so 68.94 cannot be decomposed from it, and no part of this page invents one.
What does the evaluation say about forest cover at the reserve?
It records a loss and records that the cause was not looked into. The second management weakness states that the tiger reserve has lost nearly 30 km2 of forest cover in 10 years as per the India State of Forest Report 2021, that the management has not investigated and ascertained the reason for this, and that this indicates that the threat of encroachment and habitat loss is increasing. An immediate actionable point adds that the ISFR 2021 report rings an alarm bell on carbon sequestration potential and asks management to reverse the trend. The NTCA compilation of 2024 repeats the figure as approximately 30 km2 lost in the last decade. Both statements are dated to a September 2022 visit and to the 2021 forest report, and neither is a measurement taken for this article.
What does the report recommend about the BHEL lands and about core-area tourism?
On the BHEL lands, both a weakness and an immediate actionable point state that the lands on the fringes of the reserve near Haridwar town are in the eco-sensitive zone, are largely remaining unutilised, and that there is no tree growth in that patch, suggesting that the state could impose prohibitions on building and infrastructure and that the best course would be to use the land for growing trees. The same point is printed twice in the Rajaji section, once as a weakness and once as an actionable point. On tourism, an immediate actionable point states that tourists are allowed to stay in the core area and spend the night, and that the night halts in the core area as well as the movement of safari vehicles in the core area must be phased out. Both are recommendations in an evaluation published in 2023, not records of work done.
Why does this article flag cluster labels and serial numbers in the report?
Because they do not line up, and a reader quoting a rank should know that before repeating it. Table 2.2 lists the ten expert committees and puts Rajaji under team 1a with Corbett, Melghat, Dudhwa and Pilibhit. Table 3.2 prints the same grouping as Cluster 1A. The narrative paragraph describing that table writes Cluster one, and in the same sentence credits Pench with 90.15 per cent, while the table prints 90.91 per cent for Pench and 90.15 per cent for Simlipal. The figure labels the five groups Landscape Cluster I to V, and the landscape complex table numbers its rows I, II, II, IV and V. The same reserve is numbered 48 in one list of reserves, 49 in the contents and chapter heading, and 40 in the descending score table. Membership of the group is consistent across the tables; the labels and serials are not, so this page reports the labels as printed and takes no meaning from them.