Table of Contents
Relevance
- GS Paper 3: Environment: Conservation, environmental pollution, and degradation.
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Context
- Minister of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change has recently informed that India will move to a system that will count tigers and elephants as part of a common survey.
- All-India elephant and tiger population estimation will be adopted in 2022.
- Note: Elephant is the National Heritage Animal of India and Bengal Tiger is the National Animal of India.
Wetland Ecosystem: Importance, Concerns and Conservation Measure
Key points
- Benefits of conducting a common survey:
- Common habitat: Around 90% of the area occupied by elephants and tigers is common. Hence, a common survey has the potential to significantly save costs.
- It will improve and harmonize the population estimation methods along more scientific lines in various states across India.
- Present method of conducting a survey: The tiger survey is usually held once in four years and elephants are counted once in five years.
- Tiger survey: conducted based on methods derived by the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), Dehradun in 2006.
- Tiger numbers are counted bases on sightings in camera traps and indirect estimation methods.
- Elephant survey: largely rely on States directly counting the number of elephants.
- Recent advancement in techniques: In recent years, dung samples have also been analyzed to estimate birth rates and population trends in elephants.
- Tiger survey: conducted based on methods derived by the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), Dehradun in 2006.
- Population of elephants and tigers: as per the latest Tiger survey 2018-19, there were 2,997 tigers in India. According to the last count in 2017, there were 29,964 elephants in India.
- More than 60% of the world’s elephant population is in India.
- Protection status of Asian Elephants:
- listed as “endangered” on the IUCN Red List of threatened species.
- It has also been included in Appendix I of the UN Convention on Migratory Species (CMS) at the 13th Conference of the Parties (COP) to CMS in Gandhinagar (Gujarat).
- listed in Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).
- Listed in the Schedule I of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972.
