Wildlife and Human Intervention: The Conservation Debate

The Lift Line

“Interventionist approaches such as captive breeding and reintroduction may be necessary to prevent some species from going extinct, but their success is far from guaranteed.” (Uma Ramakrishnan, The Hindu interview)

Why This Editorial Matters for Your Exam

This is not an editorial of the paper. It is an interview on The Hindu’s op-ed page of 16 October 2026: a conversation between two scientists, moderated by Jacob Koshy. Every view below belongs to the person who expressed it. The Hindu describes them as:

• Qamar Qureshi, “Retd. Professor, Wildlife Institute of India”.
• Uma Ramakrishnan, “Professor, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru”.

The question put to them is the headline: can wildlife thrive in India without active human intervention? Neither gives a plain yes or no. Qureshi says active management is “increasingly necessary because human activity has altered natural systems”. Ramakrishnan says such interventions may be necessary but their success is far from guaranteed. Both stress the protection of larger landscapes; Qureshi adds that conservation “must work with communities rather than alienate them”.

For an aspirant, the conversation is a ready map of a GS3 theme: reintroduction and captive breeding, flagship species, protected areas, and the law that governs them. Two stories this site has already covered stay in the background here: the tigress released into Buxa (deep dive; The Hindu’s editorial on it) and Project Cheetah (the Kuno update; the third site).

GS Paper 3: conservation, environmental degradation and biodiversity. Prelims: protected areas, the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), Project Tiger and Project Cheetah.

Background and Context

The background: the question behind the conversation

The interview starts from background this site has already reported. As the moderator’s introduction puts it, on 2 October 2026 a three-year-old tigress was released into the Buxa Tiger Reserve in West Bengal, “marking the beginning of a phased programme to reintroduce tigers in the reserve and establish a viable, self-sustaining population there”.

The environment ministry’s own list of tiger reintroductions, in a document of March 2025, named the Rajaji (Uttarakhand), Madhav (Madhya Pradesh), Mukundra Hills (Rajasthan) and Ramgarh Vishdhari (Rajasthan) Tiger Reserves, “with plans for Buxa Tiger Reserve next”.

Under Project Cheetah, the same document records, eight cheetahs from Namibia were translocated to Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh in September 2022, followed by twelve from South Africa in February 2023. The ministry calls it “the world’s first intercontinental large wild carnivore translocation project”, run “under the umbrella of Project Tiger”.

The moderator also cited a remark in The Economist which, in his words, “provoked backlash in India with a backhanded compliment: that India had conserved its tigers despite being a largely poor country.”

The legal frame

Project Tiger began in 1973 and completed 50 years in 2023, the ministry notes. It is a programme; the NTCA is the statutory body, created by the 2006 amendment. The 2022 amendment left its own date of coming into force to a Central Government notification.

Where the official numbers stand

The Analysis

1. Is conservation a luxury of rich countries?

Qureshi answers through history. He describes three phases: before British rule, an agrarian, forest-based economy in which nature was closely integrated with people’s lives; colonial rule, which brought new technologies, agricultural expansion and “a belief that humans could overpower nature”, contributing to substantial wildlife loss; and, after Independence, a mixture of traditional and Western attitudes. “Colonial rule left India impoverished and deprived forest-dwelling communities of many of their traditional rights.” Despite government efforts, he says, those communities still depend on forests for survival.

Ramakrishnan answers directly: “Biodiversity conservation is not the preserve of wealthy countries.” She names Costa Rica, Brazil, Rwanda and Colombia as relatively poor nations that have made conservation part of their development, and points to Costa Rica’s revenue from biodiversity tourism. Conservation, she adds, is also driven by emotion and philosophical concern, and she traces the modern Western movement to books such as Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and to 1980s ideas such as minimum viable population sizes.

Exam use: a ready rebuttal to the claim that conservation must wait for growth.

2. Flagship species: does saving the tiger save the rest?

Qureshi defends the tiger as a flagship. “Tiger conservation is often misunderstood as focusing only on tigers.” By his figures, the national exercise surveys and evaluates nearly four lakh square kilometres, against roughly one lakh square kilometres occupied by tigers, to inform conservation decisions across biogeographic regions. Protecting tiger habitat also benefits other species in the same ecosystems. The tiger draws attention and funding, while “a rare frog threatened by a mine in Maharashtra may attract little concern”. In his words, “The tiger thus serves as a symbol that amplifies the conservation message.”

He adds a warning: “We must be cautious against the growing tendency to turn national parks into safari parks”. He says that this warning was made explicitly in the 1970s, when Project Tiger was launched.

Ramakrishnan qualifies the flagship idea. Protecting the tiger “does not necessarily benefit every ecosystem”, since different habitats hold distinct communities of carnivores, herbivores and birds. The scientific case for protecting top predators rests on their ability to regulate ecosystems; their removal has caused disruption elsewhere in the world, she notes, though not specifically in the case of tigers. “Grasslands and human-dominated landscapes, for instance, may be better represented by wolves or other top predators than by tigers.”

3. Why active management, and where it stops

Qureshi says conservation cannot follow a single model across India’s diverse ecosystems. “Wolves, for instance, are a landscape species that cannot be protected through protected areas alone.” By his estimate, India spends roughly Rs 3,500 crore a year on conservation against a requirement of Rs 9,500 crore to Rs 10,000 crore; he gives no source in the interview, so treat these as his figures, not official ones. Tiger reserves, he says, are relatively well funded, while other protected areas face significant shortfalls. India’s large forest-management workforce is an advantage, but its colonial-era management systems are unevenly spread, particularly in the Himalayas, the deserts and the Northeast.

Active management, he argues, is “increasingly necessary because human activity has altered natural systems”. His example is the Terai, where periodic floods sustain the ecosystem: “without periodic floods, landscapes such as Kaziranga, Dudhwa and Valmiki would be fundamentally different.” Yet people usually want floods prevented, “illustrating the trade-offs conservation entails.”

He is equally clear about what not to do. “We must also avoid conservation models that rely on fenced enclosures.” The Great Indian Bustard, he says, needs landscape-level protection rather than conventional protected areas. Sanctuaries created for bustards in Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh failed to prevent their disappearance, in his account, because planning ignored the ecological role of grazing and the needs of local communities; in some cases, restrictions led to more blackbuck, which damaged crops and antagonised people who had tolerated or protected the birds. His conclusion: conservation “must work with communities rather than alienate them.” This site’s earlier editorial on the bustard makes a similar landscape argument.

Ramakrishnan accepts intervention with caveats. Captive breeding and reintroduction may be needed to prevent some extinctions, but success is far from guaranteed: the Mauritius kestrel is a success, other programmes have had mixed or disappointing results, and captive breeding needs substantial effort and investment. Some species, such as the saola of the Annamite Mountains (Vietnam and Laos), may already be too few for captive breeding. “Conservation cannot save every species, particularly when so little is known about biodiversity.” India, she notes, lacks basic data on insect abundance. She calls captive breeding of the Great Indian Bustard “a necessary experiment”, and compares it with vulture conservation, where reintroduction efforts “have revealed unexpected behavioural challenges that need to be understood.”

4. Landscapes beyond protected areas

Ramakrishnan says protected areas cover “only about 5%” of India’s land, “well below international recommendations”, which is why larger landscapes need safeguarding. The ministry’s figure is about 5.32 per cent (data as of November 2023). Because people have long lived in many of these landscapes, she says, conservation needs different models for different contexts.

Qureshi puts India’s protected areas at an average of roughly 200 sq km. The ministry’s totals (1,75,169.42 sq km across 1,014 areas) work out to about 173 sq km each, so his figure is a round one. Larger landscapes, he argues, “can serve as a form of insurance against future ecological risks, even when the full benefits are not yet understood.”

5. The law and the scientist

Ramakrishnan describes the Wildlife (Protection) Act as “structured primarily as a punitive law”: research such as collecting samples is often treated in the same way as hunting, so permits are needed even for scientific work. Efforts over two decades to facilitate research under the Act have not materialised, in her view, and this “disproportionately affects those without institutional privilege or the resources to navigate the system.” She wants to replace “excessive top-down control with a system that enables diverse participation.”

What the Act says. Section 2(16) defines “hunting” to include “killing or poisoning of any wild animal or captive animal”, “capturing, coursing, snaring, trapping, driving or baiting any wild or captive animal”, and “injuring or destroying or taking any part of the body of any such animal”. Section 12 lets the Chief Wildlife Warden grant a permit that shall “entitle the holder of such permit to hunt” for purposes including “scientific research”. The structure she describes is therefore in the text; “punitive” is her description of it. The 2022 amendment changed the long title to “conservation, protection and management of wild life” but did not amend Section 12.

Data and Institutions Vault

Prelims-grade facts:

Protected areas (ministry data, November 2023):

• 1,014 protected areas: 106 National Parks, 573 Wildlife Sanctuaries, 115 Conservation Reserves, 220 Community Reserves.
• Together 1,75,169.42 sq km, approximately 5.32 per cent of India’s geographical area.

Tigers:

• All India Tiger Estimation 2022: average estimate 3,682, range 3,167 to 3,925; 2,967 in 2018 and 2,226 in 2014.
• India holds about 70 per cent of the world’s wild tigers (PIB: “more than 70%” in 2023, “nearly 70%” in July 2026).
• 58 tiger reserves across 18 States, around 84,500 sq km, about 2.56 per cent of India’s area (PIB, July 2026).

Law and institutions:

• Section 38L (Chapter IVB, added in 2006) creates the NTCA. Section 38V(1): the State notifies a tiger reserve on NTCA’s advice.
• 2022 amendment (Act 18 of 2022): long title now “conservation, protection and management of wild life”; new Section 2(16A) on invasive alien species.
• Section 12: the Chief Wildlife Warden may permit a person to hunt for education, scientific research or scientific management.
• Project Tiger: 1973. Project Cheetah: September 2022, Namibia to Kuno; twelve more from South Africa in February 2023.

⚠️ Watch the trap: 3,682 is an average estimate (range 3,167 to 3,925), not a head count. Official releases put India’s share of the world’s wild tigers at about 70 per cent (“more than 70%” in 2023, “nearly 70%” in July 2026). Protected areas cover about 5.32 per cent of India’s area; “about 5%” is Ramakrishnan’s round figure. Project Tiger (1973) is a programme; the NTCA is statutory (2006, Section 38L). A tiger reserve is notified by the State Government, not the Centre.

The Debate

The case for active intervention. Qureshi argues that human activity has already altered natural systems, so leaving nature to itself is no longer a neutral choice: floods that sustain the Terai are often prevented because people want them prevented. Ramakrishnan accepts that reintroduction and captive breeding may be needed to keep some species from going extinct, and calls captive breeding of the bustard a necessary experiment.

The cautions, from the same two voices. Captive breeding is costly and uncertain (Ramakrishnan). National parks must not become safari parks, and conservation must not rely on fenced enclosures (Qureshi). A flagship does not stand in for every ecosystem (Ramakrishnan). Sanctuaries that ignored grazing and local needs failed the bustard (Qureshi). Neither scientist claims that wildlife can thrive with no human role at all, or that intervention alone will do.

The balanced verdict. The interview’s answer to its headline question depends on the species and the landscape. Intervention buys time for species in trouble; landscapes, communities, money and a law that lets scientists work decide whether that time is used well. In a Mains answer, present active management as a complement to in-situ protection at landscape scale, not a substitute for it.

How to Think About This

Run a four-level test on any conservation intervention, whether a reintroduction, a translocation or a captive-breeding programme:

1. Species: is the population too small to recover on its own, and is enough known about its behaviour? Ramakrishnan’s vulture example shows what happens when it is not.
2. Landscape: is there habitat beyond the boundary? Protected areas cover about 5.32 per cent of India, and wolves and bustards range far beyond them.
3. People: does the plan work with the communities who share the land, or antagonise them? Qureshi’s blackbuck example is the warning.
4. Science and money: can researchers study the programme without being treated like hunters, and is the money there beyond tiger reserves?

A programme that passes all four is conservation; one that passes only the first is, at best, a rescue.

Diagram-in-Words

Takeaway Box

• Core idea: Qamar Qureshi argues that active management is increasingly necessary; Uma Ramakrishnan says it may be necessary but its success is far from guaranteed; both stress landscape-level protection, and Qureshi the support of local communities.
• Know the anchors: Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972; NTCA under Section 38L (2006); tiger reserves notified by the State (Section 38V); the 2022 amendment’s new long title; Project Tiger (1973); Project Cheetah (2022).
• Know the numbers: 1,014 protected areas, about 5.32 per cent of India (November 2023); tigers 3,682 average estimate (2022), about 70 per cent of the world’s wild tigers; 58 tiger reserves (PIB, July 2026).
• Attribute, do not adopt: “about 5%”, “roughly 200 sq km” and Rs 3,500 crore against Rs 9,500 crore to Rs 10,000 crore are the interviewees’ own figures.
• Mains use: GS3 conservation; flagship species; people and protected areas; reintroduction and captive breeding.

Revision Flowchart

Sources: The Hindu, interview, “Can wildlife thrive in India without active human intervention?”, 16 October 2026; Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change via PIB, “India’s Wildlife Conservation Milestones”, March 2025; PIB, Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, year-end review 2023; The Wild Life (Protection) Amendment Act, 2006 (No. 39 of 2006); The Wild Life (Protection) Amendment Act, 2022 (No. 18 of 2022); The Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972, Sections 2(16) and 12.

Source: Wildlife and Human Intervention: The Conservation Debate — Ujiyari.com | Free UPSC & State PCS Editorial Analysis