Efforts to revive India’s tiger population began 50 years ago over fears the big cats were going extinct due to poaching and habitat loss.
India’s tiger population has climbed to 3,167 in 2022, according to the latest census released by Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the country celebrates 50 years of its tiger conservation project.
From 2006 to 2018, the tiger numbers almost doubled to 2,967 and are now well above 3,000, according to the census data released on Sunday in the nation that is home to 70 percent of the world’s tigers.
“This is a success not only for India but the entire world,” Modi said at a meeting in Mysuru in the southern state of Karnataka, where he released the report.
“India is a country where protecting nature is part of our culture.”
Project Tiger began in 1973 after a census of the big cats found India’s tigers were quickly going extinct through habitat loss, unregulated sport hunting, increased poaching and retaliatory killings by local people. Tiger reserves have gone up to 53 from the original nine when the tiger conservation effort was launched.
The tiger population was believed to have been about 1,800 50 years ago, but experts widely consider that an overestimate due to imprecise counting methods in India until the current survey was launched in 2006. It conducts a count every four years, and in its first census, 1,411 tigers were counted.
Modi said despite India having only 2.4 percent of the world’s land area, it contributes about “8 percent of the world’s known global [species] diversity”.
Project Tiger leads the way in protection and conservation of the big cats. https://t.co/53B9nwsNkt
Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) April 9, 2023
Modi also launched the International Big Cats Alliance, which he said will focus on the protection and conservation of seven big cat species: the tiger, lion, leopard, snow leopard, puma, jaguar and cheetah.
Rajesh Gopal from the Global Tiger Forum said the efforts of Project Tiger were “really successful” and “unparalleled in conservation history”.
“Over the past 50 years, so much has been done … and learned about the animal/predator, the co-predators and the people who live around,” he told Al Jazeera from Mysuru.
But Indigenous groups and some conservationists say the project has led to the displacement of communities that had lived in the forests since millennia.
About 40,000 tigers were believed to have lived in India at the time of its independence from Britain in 1947. Since seeing such a steep drop in its tiger numbers, India has sought to improve its management of the predator by reserving habitat exclusively for the animals from the Himalayan foothills in the northeast to regions in western and central India.
The country’s growing human population has increasingly encroached into the territory of the wild animals, pushing them into frequent conflicts with humans.
It is a crime to kill tigers, which are categorised as endangered under India’s Wildlife Protection Act.
