India has a Memorandum of Understanding with Nepal on controlling trans-boundary illegal trade in wildlife and conservation, apart from a protocol on tiger conservation with China.
A Global Tiger Forum of Tiger Range Countries has been created for addressing international issues related to tiger conservation.
During the 14th meeting of the Conference of Parties to CITES, which was held from 3rd to 15th June, 2007 at The Hague, India introduced a resolution along with China, Nepal and the Russian Federation, with directions to Parties with operations breeding tigers on a commercial scale, for restricting such captive populations to a level supportive only to conserving wild tigers. The resolution was adopted as a decision with minor amendments. Further, India made an intervention appealing to China to phase out tiger farming, and eliminate stockpiles of Asian big cats body parts and derivatives. The importance of continuing the ban on trade of body parts of tigers was emphasized.
Based on India’s strong intervention during the 58th meeting of the Standing Committee of the CITES at Geneva from 6th to 10th July, 2009, the CITES Secretariat issued notification to Parties for submitting reports relating to compliance of Decisions 14.69 and 14.65 within 90 days with effect from 20.10.2009 (Progress made on restricting captive breeding operations of tigers etc.). During the 15th meeting of the Conference of Parties, India intervened for retaining the Decision 14.69 dealing with operations breeding tigers on a commercial scale.
Management Effectiveness Evaluation
Survival of tigers is dependent on conservation and management efforts. To gauge the success of conservation efforts as well as to guide management inputs, it is important to assess the effectiveness of management of Tiger Reserves.
Post the disappearance of tigers in Sariska Tiger Reserve, the Government of India issued a directive to the Office of Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) of India and the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), Government of India to conduct an independent audit and place the report in the Parliament.
The Wildlife Institute of India (WII) in close collaboration with global experts and National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) developed a framework for independent evaluation procedure to evaluate Tiger Reserves of the country. MEE Framework includes consideration of design issues, the adequacy and appropriateness of management systems and processes and the delivery of protected area objectives including conservation of values.
(Honourable Prime Minister of India releasing MEE report -2018 at New Delhi)
India is among the select countries in the world that have institutionalized the MEE Process. India made a beginning in evaluating the management effectiveness of its world heritage sites, national parks, wildlife sanctuaries and Tiger Reserves in 2006.Four repeat cycles of evaluation of Tiger Reserves Network have been made after every four years from 2006 to 2018 in India. This process is the most significant approach for tiger conservation and associated landscape connectivity conservation and management.
For more information on MEE, the details of past evaluation exercises and the reports, please visit the ‘Report‘ section of this website.
Counting tigers in India
Tigers are a conservation dependent species. Major threats to tigers are poaching that is driven by an illegal international demand for tiger parts and products, depletion of tiger prey, and habitat loss due to the ever increasing demand for forested lands. To gauge the success of conservation efforts as well as to have a finger on the pulse of tiger populations and their ecosystems, the National Tiger Conservation Authority in collaboration with the State Forest Departments, the Wildlife Institute of India and conservation partners conducts a National assessment for the “Status of Tigers, Co-predators, Prey and their Habitat” once inevery four years. The methodology used for this assessment was approved by the Tiger Task Force in 2005. The first assessment based on this scientific methodology was done in 2006 and subsequently in 2010, 2014 and 2018.
In 2006, the tiger population was estimated at 1,411 (1,165 to 1,657) which was much lower than the earlier official estimates. This brought about major changes in tiger conservation policy, legislation, and management. Special stress was laid on village relocation from core/critical tiger habitats and enhancing protection by creating the Special Tiger Protection Force. Subsequently, these concerted actions resulted in an upward trend in the tiger population as documented by the 2010 population estimates of 1,706.
(Honourable Prime Minister of India releasing the report ‘Status of Tigers in India – 2018’ on the occasion of Global Tiger Day at New Delhi, India).
However, the 2010 assessment also showed a decline in tiger occupied area. This decline in tiger occupancy was recorded in areas outside of tiger reserves, indicating loss of habitat quality and extent – a crucial element essential for maintaining genetic connectivity between individual tiger populations. To address this vital conservation concern, the NTCA in collaboration with the WII delineated the minimal tiger habitat corridors connecting tiger reserves for implementing landscape scale tiger conservation. Now all tiger reserves manage their tiger populations based on a tiger conservation plan (TCP), which addresses specific prescriptions for core, buffer, and corridor habitats.
The 2014 assessment, further bore testimony to the inputs provided by Project Tiger and based on the double sampling approach, showed a 30% increase over the previous cycle. India now has 70 % of the global tiger population at 2226. 1540 distinct camera trapped photographs of tigers have been obtained and the rest based on sound statistically robust, spatially explicit capture recapture (SECR) models.
The fourth cycle of National tiger status assessment of 2018-19 is the most accurate survey conducted. The survey covered 381,400 km 2 of forested habitats in 20 tiger occupied states of India. A foot survey of 522,996 km was done for carnivore signs and prey abundance estimation. In these forests, 317,958 habitat plots were sampled for vegetation, human impacts and prey dung.
Camera traps were deployed at 26,838 locations. These cameras resulted in 34,858,623 photographs of wildlife of which 76,651 were of tigers and 51,777 were of leopards. The total area sampled by camera traps was 121,337 km 2 . The total effort invested in the survey was 593,882 man-days. We believe that this is the world’s largest effort invested in any wildlife survey till date, on all of the above criteria.
A total of 2,461 individual tigers (>1 year of age) were photo-captured. The overall tiger population in India was estimated at 2,967 (SE range 2,603 to 3,346) (Table 1, Fig. 7-11). Out of this, 83% were actually camera trapped individual tigers and 87% were accounted for by camera-trap based capture-mark-recapture and remaining 13% estimated through covariate based models. Tigers were observed to be increasing at a rate of 6% per annum in India when consistently sampled areas were compared from 2006 to 2018. Tiger occupancy was found to be stable at 88,985 km 2 the country scale since 2014 (88,558 km 2 ). Though there were
losses and gains at individual landscapes and state scales.
For further details and past tiger monitoring reports, please visit the ‘All India Tiger Estimation Reports’ under ‘Reports‘ section of this website.
MSTrIPES (Monitoring System for Tigers: Intensive Protection and Ecological Status)
Currently the tiger reserves carry out law enforcement and ecological monitoring activities at regular interval, but the information generated is ad hoc and is rarely available to the tiger reserve managers in a format for informed decision making in an adaptive management framework. The “M-STrIPES” has been designed to addresses this void.It is a platform where modern technology is used to assist effective patrolling, assess ecological status and mitigate human-wildlife conflict in and around tiger reserves.
The MSTrIPES program uses Global Positioning System (GPS), General Packet Radio Services (GPRS), and remote sensing, to collect information from the field, create a database using modern Information Technology (IT) based tools, analyses the information using GIS and statistical tools to provide inferences that allow tiger reserve managers to better manage their wildlife resources.
Patrol module
The patrol module maintains a spatial database of patrol track logs, crime scenes with geotagged photographs and important observations made by field staff while on different types of patrol duties. The phone app allows visualization of all patrols in real time across the country when in cellular network connectivity. It also permits the guard to send geotagged location data to specified phone numbers in case of emergency (SOS) function. The mobile app can continue to operate in areas without phone network by using the phone’s inbuilt GPS and preloaded base maps.
Ecological Module
The tiger reserves of India use a set of standardized protocols for ecological monitoring by field staff which include the following components:
1) Occupancy of carnivores and large ungulates,
2) Abundance estimation of ungulates,
3) Assessment of anthropogenic impacts and
4) Habitat assessment.
The ecological monitoring comprising of above components are implemented across the country at a spatial resolution of 20 square km every four years and twice annually within all tiger reserves and these standardized protocols are now part of ‘Ecological Module’ of MSTrIPES program.
Conflict Module
The conflict module of MSTrIPES addresses data recording, achieving, geotagging, and spatial analysis of human-wildlife conflict details. The app has provision for recording the details of attacks on humans, attacks on livestock, crop damage and property damage. This information on location, with spatially referenced photo-evidence, and extent of conflict allows wildlife managers to mitigate conflict with appropriate interventions.
As a part of active management to rebuild Sariska and Panna Tiger Reserves where tigers have become locally extinct, reintroduction of tigers / tigresses have been done.
Special advisories issued for in-situ build up of prey base and tiger population through active management in tiger reserves having low population status of tiger and its prey.
The policy initiatives announced by the Finance Minister in his Budget Speech of 29.2.2008, interalia, contains action points relating to tiger protection. Based on the one time grant of Rs. 50.00 crore provided to the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) for raising, arming and deploying a Special Tiger Protection Force, the proposal for the said force has been approved by the competent authority for 13 tiger reserves.
As of now Rs. 93 lakhs each has been released to Corbett, Ranthambhore & Dudhwa Tiger Reserve for creation of STPF during 2008-09. Since then, the guidelines of the STPF have been revised for deploying forest personnel in place of Police as an option-II, with scope for involving local people like the Van Gujjars.
Details of technical and financial support will be given here.
Voluntary Village Relocation Program
