On International Tiger Day, 29 July 2026, Union Petroleum Minister Hardeep Singh Puri saluted the forest staff, conservationists, researchers and local communities whose collective effort has made India home to the world's largest, most viable and stable wild tiger population — a status the country has held through decades of sustained, structured conservation work.

From near-collapse in 1973 to a global conservation benchmark

The story begins with a crisis. By the early 1970s, tiger numbers across India had fallen sharply, prompting the government to launch Project Tiger in 1973 — one of the world's earliest dedicated large-carnivore recovery programmes. The scheme established a network of protected reserves, restricted human activity in core zones, and created a cadre of dedicated forest protection staff. What followed was one of wildlife conservation's more remarkable reversals.

The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), the statutory body under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, has since overseen the programme's expansion and conducts a comprehensive All India Tiger Estimation census every four years. The results have tracked a broadly upward trajectory across key landscapes — the Western Ghats, Central India and the Terai arc along the Nepal border.

The 2010 St. Petersburg pledge and India's delivery

At the 2010 Global Tiger Summit in St. Petersburg, tiger-range nations committed to doubling wild tiger populations by 2022 — the Tx2 goal. India's census results in subsequent years placed it among the few countries to have meaningfully advanced that target, a point successive governments have cited as evidence that community-linked, enforcement-backed conservation can work at scale.

Minister Puri's post underlines that the achievement is not the state's alone. 'This remarkable achievement reflects the power of their collective effort and enduring commitment to wildlife conservation,' he wrote, explicitly naming forest staff, conservationists, researchers and local communities as co-authors of the outcome. That framing matters: community participation in buffer zones — through eco-tourism revenue sharing and voluntary relocation schemes — has been a structural pillar of the model.

What the next tiger census will reveal

The conservation community is now watching for the next All India Tiger Estimation report, which will provide updated population figures and assess whether protected-area management plans are keeping pace with habitat pressures. Encroachment, linear infrastructure through forest corridors and human-wildlife conflict remain live challenges in several landscapes, even as headline numbers have improved.

International Tiger Day, established to drive global awareness of the species' vulnerability, gives India an annual platform to signal its conservation credentials — and to press for stronger international cooperation in range states where tiger recovery has stalled.