Tigers in India

Saving Tigers Successfully takes Government, Vigilance and Persistence

Saving animals from the brink of extinction will always qualify as a good thing. Doing it on a sustained level with public sector help is even better.

Project Tiger was launched in 1973 as a commendable program aimed at protecting and reviving India’s tiger population which had fallen dramatically thanks to poaching (primarily) and environmental issues. It has been a resounding success! India is home to 75% of the world’s wild tigers.

Editor’s Note: India has a central state, Madhya Pradesh, which is known as the 'tiger state'.

Fifty years after its inception, in July 2023, India announced it had completed a survey recording at least 3,682 tigers. Such survey scour over 90 million acres and employ human surveillance, camera traps and drones. This 2023 survey marks the high-water mark after a series of recent, positive survey results: the 2022 survey found 619 more tigers than 2018’s and more than double the tigers accounted for in 2006. For context, there were an estimated 40,000 tigers in India back in the early twentieth century.

So what is driving this good news? According to conservation lead Pranav Chanchani, first and foremost it is support from India’s government. Case in point, there are now 53 tiger reserves, up from nine in the ’70s. But just as vital, and even more interesting, are the steps that the initiative has taken to make living with tigers more economically viable. The WWF has facilitated relief programs that compensate people for lost livestock.

“We must ensure that people sharing space with them are not left with huge costs, and that conservation also serves people…”

India has 1.4 BILLION people, if programs can successfully regrow tiger populations and create the contours of coexistence, then a remarkably good thing has been done.