Project Tiger was launched in which year?

The correct answer is A, Jim Corbett National Park, in what is now Uttarakhand. It is the oldest national park of India, and the project was formally launched there on 1 April 1973.

Option B, Kanha in Madhya Pradesh, and option C, Bandipur in Karnataka, were both among the nine reserves with which the project began, which is what makes them good distractors, but the launch took place at Corbett. Option D, Kaziranga in Assam, is not a launch site either; it is known above all for the one horned rhinoceros and became a tiger reserve much later. A candidate should remember the nine original reserves as a set: Corbett, Manas, Palamau, Similipal, Kanha, Melghat, Bandipur, Ranthambore and the Sunderbans. The park is named after Jim Corbett, the hunter turned naturalist whose writings did much to make the tiger a matter of public concern in India.

The correct answer is A, the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972. The amending Act of 2006 inserted a new chapter into it, creating the National Tiger Conservation Authority and providing for tiger reserves with a critical tiger habitat and a buffer, as well as for the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau.

Option B, the Indian Forest Act, 1927, deals with reserved and protected forests and with forest produce, not with the Authority. Option C, the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, is the umbrella law passed after the Bhopal disaster and is the basis of rules on pollution and environmental clearance. Option D, the Biological Diversity Act, 2002, set up the National Biodiversity Authority and deals with access to biological resources and the sharing of benefits, and the similarity of the two names is the trap here.

The correct answer is B, 1992. Project Elephant was launched in February 1992 as a centrally sponsored scheme to help the states protect elephants, their habitats and their corridors, to reduce conflict between elephants and human beings and to improve the welfare of captive elephants.

Option A, 1973, belongs to Project Tiger, and the pair of years is the most commonly asked fact from this topic. Option C, 2010, is the year in which the elephant was declared the National Heritage Animal of India, a different event that is often mixed up with the launch of the project. Option D, 1986, is the year of the Environment (Protection) Act and of the Ganga Action Plan, neither of which concerns elephants. A simple way to keep the two projects apart is that the tiger came first, with the law of 1972 behind it, and the elephant followed nearly twenty years later.

The correct answer is A, 2010. The declaration followed the report of a task force on elephants and was meant to raise the status of the animal in policy and to strengthen the protection of its habitats and corridors.

Option B, 1992, is the year of the launch of Project Elephant itself, not of the declaration, and the two are the standard pair of distractors. Option C, 2005, is associated with the Sariska episode and the Tiger Task Force. Option D, 1973, is the year of Project Tiger and of the tiger becoming the national animal. Note the difference in terms: the tiger is the national animal, while the elephant is the national heritage animal, and an examiner will often set the two against each other in the same question.

The correct answer is A, monitoring the illegal killing of elephants. MIKE was set up under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. At selected sites, officials record every elephant carcass found and the cause of death in a standard form, so that the share of deaths due to poaching can be tracked and compared between countries and over time. Sites in South Asia, including several in India, have been covered since 2003.

Option B describes the all India tiger estimation carried out by the National Tiger Conservation Authority with the Wildlife Institute of India, which is a different exercise altogether. Option C and option D belong to climate and pollution monitoring and have nothing to do with the programme. The expansion of the name is itself the answer, which is why it is worth memorising.