Lagatar24 Desk
New Delhi, Dec 30: India’s tiger conservation organisation body has reported that 126 of the endangered big cats perished in 2021, the greatest number since records began a decade ago.
According to the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), the most recent death occurred on Wednesday in Madhya Pradesh.
Before the authorities began recording data in 2012, the year with the most deaths was 2016, when 121 tigers had died.
Around 75% of the world’s tigers are found in India.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed the feat as “historic” after the government stated the population had climbed to 2,967 in 2018 from a record low of 1,411 in 2006.
However, it’s possible that this was due in part to the survey’s size, which used an unprecedented number of video traps to identify individual tigers using stripe pattern recognition software.
The NTCA said that ‘natural causes’ were the leading cause of death over the last decade, but many also died as a result of poachers and ‘human-animal conflict.’
In the country of 1.3 billion people, human encroachment on tiger habitats has risen in recent decades. According to government statistics, tiger attacks killed about 225 people between 2014 and 2019.
The government has taken steps to effectively manage the tiger population, allocating 50 sites for the animals around the country.
“India has now firmly established a leadership role in tiger conservation, with its benchmarking practices being looked at as a gold standard across the world,” a government release said in July last year.
