Tiger Reserves in India makes a New Entry

India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change has declared the country’s new Tiger Reserve in Chhattisgarh.

Guru Ghasidas-Tamor Pingla Tiger Reserve located in the northern part of central Indian state of Chhattisgarh is India’s 56th Tiger Reserve.

The newly notified tiger reserve is spread over 2,829.38 sq. km and includes a core/critical tiger habitat of 2049.2 sq. km, comprising the Guru Ghasidas National Park and Tamor Pingla Wildlife Sanctuary, and has a buffer of 780.15 sq. km.

This makes Guru Ghasidas-Tamor Pingla Tiger Reserve the third largest tiger reserve in the country after Nagarjunasagar-Srisailam Tiger Reserve in Andhra Pradesh and Manas Tiger Reserve in Assam.

Nestled in the Chota Nagpur plateau and partly in the Baghelkhand plateau, the tiger reserve is blessed with varied terrains, dense forests, streams and rivers favourable for harbouring a rich faunal diversity and contains critical habitats for the tiger.

A total of 753 species, including 365 invertebrates and 388 vertebrates, have been documented from Guru Ghasidas-Tamor Pingla Tiger Reserve by the Zoological Survey of India.

The reserve includes 230 species of birds and 55 species of mammals comprising several threatened species like leopards, hyenas, jackals, wolves, barking deer, chinkara, and chital.

Guru Ghasidas-Tamor Pingla Tiger Reserve is contiguous with the Sanjay Dubri Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh forming a landscape complex of nearly 4500 sq. km. Further, the tiger reserve is connected to the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh to the West and Palamau Tiger Reserve in Jharkhand to the East.

With this notification, Chhattisgarh is now home to four Tiger Reserves – Indravati in Bijapur district, Udanti-Sitanadi in Gariaband, Achanakmar in Mungeli and the latest Guru Ghasidas-Tamor Pingla. The total tiger reserves in India have now gone up to 56, collectively protecting an area of 78,626.21 sq. km or ~2.3% of the country’s geographical area.

The tiger is India’s national animal, and considering the ecological significance of the species, India launched the ‘Project Tiger’ scheme in 1973 with broad aims of not only protecting the declining populations of tigers across the country but also harnessing the functional role and its charisma to garner resources and elicit public support for conservation of representative ecosystems and associated biodiversity in different biogeographic zones.

Initially, the Government of India launched the scheme with the establishment of nine tiger reserves (ca. 18,278 sq. km) in different prominent forest types across the country and adopted the concept of ‘core’ and ‘buffer’ zones.

Project Tiger adopted an ecosystem-based conservation approach in the country and promoted several allied management activities relevant to protection, wireless communication, fire prevention and control, habitat improvement/ management, wildlife research, population estimation of tiger (pug mark census) and prey, monitoring of habitat and wildlife health, wildlife tourism and nature interpretation, and voluntary village relocation and ecodevelopment.

After 1973, Project Tiger continued to establish newer Tiger Reserves and review its decadal success by the tiger population census based on the pug mark technique that indicated approximately 3,500 tigers across the country by the 1990s.

The addition of tiger reserves in India is bound to strengthen the conservation of the species with ongoing technical and financial assistance from the National Tiger Conservation Authority under Project Tiger.

The country harbours nearly 70% of the global wild tiger population and its annual growth rate is increasing at 6%. The minimum estimated tiger population in 2022 was estimated to be 3,167 individual tigers. Population increase was substantial in Shivalik and Gangetic floodplains, followed by Central India, North Eastern Hills and Brahmaputra floodplains and Sundarbans.

The success of India in conserving and doubling its wild tiger population in about 12 years, much before the targeted year of 2022 as per the St. Petersburg Declaration, is admirable.