Wildlife

Story hook

In 1973, Project Tiger was launched with 9 reserves covering 14,000 sq km. The motivating fact was brutal: India had 40,000 tigers in 1900; by 1972, only 1,827 survived. Kailash Sankhala, the project's first director, walked into Ranthambore and found exactly 14 tigers in the 274 sq km park. Fifty-two years later, the 2022 All-India Tiger Estimation (released April 2023) counted 3,682 tigers across 53 reserves spanning 75,800 sq km — India now hosts 75% of the world's wild tigers. It is the single largest conservation comeback in modern ecological history.

But the tiger is only the flagship. India holds 7-8% of all recorded species on Earth, packed into 2.4% of the land surface. We are one of 17 megadiverse countries (a Conservation International list dating to 1998). India has four of the world's 36 biodiversity hotspots — Western Ghats, Himalayas, Indo-Burma, and Sundaland (Nicobar). We have 1,331 bird species, 422 mammals, 540 reptiles, 415 amphibians, 3,022 fish, and over 49,000 plant species.

Rodgers and Panwar (1988) — two Wildlife Institute of India scientists — drew the rational map: 10 biogeographic zones, 27 biotic provinces. This file walks through the ten zones, the flagship species each shelters, and the legal architecture (Wildlife Protection Act 1972, Project Tiger, Project Elephant, Tiger Reserves, Biosphere Reserves, Ramsar wetlands) that keeps the system alive — or that tries to. The 2024 Wayanad landslides, the 2025 cheetah deaths at Kuno, and the 2026 winter migratory bird census at Chilika are not separate stories; they are entries in the same ledger.

Why this matters for UPSC

UPSC Prelims has asked at least 2-3 biodiversity questions every year since 2015 — tiger reserves, biosphere reserves, Ramsar sites, IUCN status, biogeographic zones, flagship species, or endemic plants. Mains GS-III has asked direct biodiversity- conservation questions in 2014, 2017, 2020, 2022, 2024. This unit also feeds Environment & Ecology (a Prelims paper-2 favourite) and bridges into GS-II International Relations (CITES, CBD, Nagoya Protocol).