Efforts to revive India’s tiger population began 50 years ago out of fear that the big cats would go extinct due to poaching and habitat loss.
India’s tiger population has risen to 3,167 in 2022, according to the latest census released by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as the country celebrates 50 years of the tiger conservation project.
From 2006 to 2018, tiger numbers nearly doubled to 2,967 and now number well above 3,000, according to census data released Sunday in the country that is home to 70 percent of the world’s tigers.
“This is a success not only for India, but for the whole 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 showed that Indian tigers were rapidly becoming extinct due to habitat loss, unregulated sport hunting, increased poaching and retaliatory killings by local people. Tiger reserves increased to 53 from the original nine when conservation efforts began.
The tiger population was believed to be about 1,800 50 years ago, but experts generally believe this is an overestimate due to inaccurate counting methods in India until the current study was launched in 2006. It conducts a census every four years, and in the first census, 1,411 tigers were counted.
Modi said that 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 is at the forefront of big cat protection and conservation. https://t.co/53B9nwsNkt
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) April 9, 2023
Modi also launched the International Big Cats Alliance, which he says will focus on the protection and conservation of seven big cats: the tiger, lion, leopard, snow leopard, cougar, jaguar and cheetah.
Rajesh Gopal of the Global Tiger Forum said Project Tiger’s efforts were “truly successful” and “unparalleled in the history of conservation”.
“In the last 50 years so much has been done…and learned about the animal/predator, its fellow predators and the people living around it,” he told Al Jazeera of Mysuru.
But indigenous groups and some conservationists say the project has led to the displacement of communities that have lived in the forests for millennia.
It was believed that about 40,000 tigers lived in India at the time of its independence from Britain in 1947. Ever since India saw such a sharp decline in tiger numbers, India has tried to improve the management of the predator by making habitat exclusive. reserve for the animals from India. the foothills of the Himalayas in the northeast to regions of western and central India.
The country’s growing human population has increasingly encroached on the wildlife’s territory, bringing them into frequent conflicts with humans.
It is a crime to kill tigers, which are listed as endangered under India’s Wildlife Protection Act.