Project Tiger and Project Elephant: NTCA, Reserves and MIKE

Project Tiger and Project Elephant are the two species specific programmes on which India's wildlife conservation rests. Both are centrally sponsored schemes of the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, and both protect a species by protecting the habitat it needs, which in turn shelters everything else that lives there. The tiger and the elephant are what ecologists call umbrella species, and the questions asked about them in examinations are mostly about dates, the institutions created and the legal provisions behind them.

Project Tiger

Project Tiger was launched on 1 April 1973, the year in which the tiger replaced the lion as the national animal of India. It began at Jim Corbett National Park in what is now Uttarakhand, with nine tiger reserves: Corbett, Manas, Palamau, Similipal, Kanha, Melghat, Bandipur, Ranthambore and the Sunderbans. The number of reserves has grown many times over since, and they are spread over most of the states that have tiger habitat.

The scheme works on the core and buffer strategy. The core or critical tiger habitat is kept free of human use and is managed for the tiger alone, while the buffer around it allows regulated use and is managed for the people who live there as well as for wildlife. Each reserve is run on a Tiger Conservation Plan prepared under the Wild Life (Protection) Act. The loss of the whole tiger population of the Sariska reserve, discovered in 2005, led to the appointment of a Tiger Task Force and to a change in the law.

The National Tiger Conservation Authority

The Wild Life (Protection) Amendment Act of 2006 inserted a new chapter into the Act of 1972 and gave statutory status to the National Tiger Conservation Authority. The Authority is chaired by the Union Minister in charge of environment and forests and includes members of Parliament, officials and experts. It approves the Tiger Conservation Plan of every reserve, lays down standards for management, recommends the notification of core and buffer areas by the state governments, and no alteration in the boundaries of a core area may be made without its advice. The same amendment provided for the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau, set up in 2007 to fight the organised trade in wildlife parts. The Authority, with the Wildlife Institute of India, carries out the all India tiger estimation once every four years, using camera traps and sign surveys on a scale that has made it the largest exercise of its kind in the world. India is also a member of the Global Tiger Forum, the only intergovernmental body devoted to the tiger, which has its headquarters in New Delhi, and of the agreement of the thirteen tiger range countries made at St Petersburg in 2010, which set the goal of doubling the number of wild tigers. Global Tiger Day is observed on 29 July.

Project Elephant

Project Elephant was launched in February 1992. Its objects are to protect elephants, their habitat and the corridors along which they move, to deal with the conflict between elephants and human beings, and to look after the welfare of elephants held in captivity. Elephant reserves are notified by the state governments under the scheme, and the elephant ranges of India fall into four broad regions, the north-eastern, the east central, the north-western and the southern. The Asian elephant was declared the National Heritage Animal of India in 2010, and World Elephant Day is observed on 12 August. India takes part in the MIKE programme, the Monitoring of Illegal Killing of Elephants, which is run under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species and has covered sites in South Asia since 2003. In 2023 the two projects were brought together under a single division of the Ministry so that reserves, corridors and funds could be managed as one.

Legal protection and the common problems

Both species are listed in Schedule I of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972, which gives them the highest degree of protection and the severest penalties for hunting, and both are in Appendix I of CITES, so that international trade in them is banned. Both face the same set of problems: the loss and fragmentation of habitat by roads, railways, canals and mines; the blocking of corridors, which for the elephant is a matter of life and death because a herd must move between forests with the seasons; poaching for skin, bone and ivory; and the conflict that follows when animals stray into fields and villages. The answers are also common to both, namely secure core areas, corridors kept open with underpasses and overpasses, prompt payment of compensation for crop and cattle loss, and the sharing of the gains of tourism with the people who live around the reserve.