Context

• The All India Tiger Estimation 2018, released last year, has entered the Guinness World Record for being the world’s largest camera trap wildlife survey.

Key Details

• The country now has an estimated 2967 tigers as per the latest census. With this number, India is home to nearly 75% of the global tiger population and has already fulfilled its resolve of doubling tiger numbers, made at St. Petersburg in 2010, much before the target year of 2022 through “Sankalp se Sidhi”.
• The survey was carried out by the Indian government’s National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), in collaboration with state forest departments and conservation NGOs.
• A positive outcome of the survey was that it concluded that India’s tiger population had increased by roughly one-third: from 2,226 in 2014 to 2,927 in 2018, though some have cautioned that this rise may in part reflect more comprehensive surveying as opposed to purely a population surge.
• In 2018–19, the ground surveys and camera traps recorded tiger presence in 88,985 km2 (34,357 sq mi) of forests across 20 Indian states, with the majority being found in Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Uttarakhand. The three states alone accounted for 1,492 tigers.

Back to Basics:

• M-STrIPES(Monitoring System for Tigers – Intensive Protection and Ecological Status) is an app based monitoring system, launched across Indian tiger reserves by the NTCA in 2010.
• Tiger is the largest cat species and a member of the genus Panthera. It stretches from Siberian temperate forests to subtropical and tropical forests on the Indian subcontinentand Sumatra.
• Protection of Tiger: IUCN- Endangered, CITES- Appendix I, Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972-Schedule I