Skip to footer

India’s tigers come roaring back

|
Bikas Das/AP
A Royal Bengal tiger rests at its enclosure at the Alipore Zoo in Kolkata, India. India's tiger population has grown to nearly 3,000, making the country one of the safest habitats for the endangered animals.

Almost a decade ago, India implemented a goal to double its endangered Bengal tiger population by 2022. On International Tiger Day, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the country had reached its goal four years earlier than hoped.

Due to stricter wildlife policies and improved safety monitoring, India’s tiger population climbed 33% between 2014 and 2018. While the worldwide tiger population is still stumbling along at just under 4,000 tigers, India is home to almost three-quarters of the cats.

“There are several plants and animals out there that need our help,” Mr. Modi said at a press conference. “What is it that we can do, either through technology or human action, to give them ... a life so that they can add beauty and diversity to our planet?”

In the past decade, India has created almost two dozen tiger reserves. Besides serving as a protective area for tigers, sanctuaries also allow for other wildlife and forests to prosper. To count tigers, India uses camera traps, placed in wildlife reserves. Tigers are tracked through pattern recognition programs, which detect stripe patterns and create three-dimensional representations of individual cats.

There is still work that needs to be done in some Indian villages, where tigers and villagers have long had a violent relationship. In parts of eastern India, the tiger population is still declining despite funds to counteract the slide.

SOURCE:

Wildlife Institute of India National Tiger Conservation Authority

|
Jacob Turcotte/Staff

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to India’s tigers come roaring back
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2019/0730/India-s-tigers-come-roaring-back
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe