Can wildlife thrive in India without active human intervention?

Recently, The Economist provoked backlash in India with a backhanded compliment: that India had conserved its tigers despite being a largely poor country. Historically, does conservation follow countries attaining a degree of wealth? Is India an exception?

Qamar Qureshi: India’s relationship with nature has evolved through three historical phases. Before British rule, India had a largely agrarian, forest-based economy in which nature was closely integrated with people’s lives and livelihoods. Colonial rule fundamentally altered this relationship through new technologies, agricultural expansion and a belief that humans could overpower nature, contributing to substantial wildlife loss. After Independence, India inherited 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, these communities remain dependent on forests for survival.

Uma Ramakrishnan: Biodiversity conservation is not the preserve of wealthy countries. Several relatively poor nations, including Costa Rica, Brazil, Rwanda and Colombia, have prioritised conservation as part of their development trajectories. Conservation can also generate revenue through biodiversity-related tourism, as Costa Rica demonstrates. Conservation is also driven by emotion and a philosophical concern about the destruction of nature. The modern Western conservation movement drew impetus from works such as Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, while conservation science developed further in the 1980s through concepts such as minimum viable population sizes and organisations such as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

How does conservation science in India decide which species deserve priority, given the focus on tigers and lions while vultures and caracals receive less attention?

Qamar Qureshi: Conservation operates through two mechanisms: hope for a better future and guilt over the destruction of nature and the extinction of species. It is also political, with science providing the evidence to support action. We must be cautious against the growing tendency to turn national parks into safari parks; this was an explicit warning made in the 1970s, when the then government launched Project Tiger. Tiger conservation is often misunderstood as focusing only on tigers. The exercise of surveying and evaluating nearly four lakh square kilometres across India, compared with the roughly one lakh square kilometres occupied by tigers, is intended to inform conservation decisions across biogeographic regions. Protecting tiger habitats also benefits other species occupying the same ecosystems. Flagship species such as the tiger attract public and political attention as well as funding; however, a rare frog threatened by a mine in Maharashtra may attract little concern. The tiger thus serves as a symbol that amplifies the conservation message.

Also read: All animals need equal consideration

Does the evidence show that protecting a flagship species also benefits the wider ecosystem, or do other species fail to flourish despite that protection?

Uma Ramakrishnan: Protecting a flagship species such as the tiger does not necessarily benefit every ecosystem, since different habitats have distinct communities of carnivores, herbivores and birds. The tiger serves as a flagship species by attracting protection, while the scientific rationale for protecting top predators rests on their ability to regulate ecosystems — their removal has been shown to cause ecosystem disruption in several parts of the world, 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.

Given historically low tiger numbers in parts of the Northeast, are active interventions such as tiger reintroductions necessary?

Qamar Qureshi: 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. India spends roughly ₹3,500 crore annually on conservation, against a requirement of ₹9,500–₹10,000 crore. Although tiger reserves receive relatively good funding, other protected areas face significant shortfalls. India’s extensive forest-management workforce is an advantage, but its colonial-era management systems are unevenly distributed, particularly in the Himalayas, deserts and Northeast. ‘Active management,’ is increasingly necessary because human activity has altered natural systems. Natural processes such as flooding sustain ecosystems in the Terai: without periodic floods, landscapes such as Kaziranga, Dudhwa and Valmiki would be fundamentally different. Yet preventing floods is often a human priority, illustrating the trade-offs conservation entails. 

We must also avoid conservation models that rely on fenced enclosures. Species such as the Great Indian Bustard require landscape-level protection rather than conventional protected areas. Sanctuaries that were created for bustards, including in Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh, failed to prevent their disappearance because conservation planning did not adequately account for the ecological role of grazing or the needs of local communities. In some cases, restrictions led to increases in blackbuck populations that damaged crops, antagonising people who had tolerated or protected the birds. Bustards survived in landscapes partly because of local people’s support, and conservation must work with communities rather than alienate them. 

Is interventionist conservation necessary now to prevent species from going extinct?

Uma Ramakrishnan: 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. While the Mauritius kestrel is an example of successful reintroduction (in Mauritius), other programmes have had mixed or disappointing results. Moreover, captive breeding requires substantial effort and investment. Some species, such as the saola of the Annamite Mountains (Vietnam and Laos), may already have dwindled to numbers too low for captive breeding, leaving their genomes as the principal record of their existence. Conservation cannot save every species, particularly when so little is known about biodiversity. India, for instance, lacks basic data on insect abundance, making it difficult to establish whether insect populations are undergoing widespread declines. Protected areas cover only about 5% of India’s land, well below international recommendations, underscoring the need to safeguard larger landscapes. However, given that people have long inhabited many of these areas, conservation must adopt different models suited to different contexts. The captive breeding for the Great Indian Bustard is a necessary experiment and parallels with vulture conservation, where reintroduction efforts have revealed unexpected behavioural challenges that need to be understood.

Qamar Qureshi: Protecting sufficiently large areas is essential, particularly because scientists do not yet know enough about many species and ecosystems to identify every conservation priority. With India’s protected areas averaging roughly 200 sq km, safeguarding larger landscapes can serve as a form of insurance against future ecological risks, even when the full benefits are not yet understood.

What changes are needed to improve conservation science and wildlife biology?

Uma Ramakrishnan: India’s Wildlife (Protection) Act is structured primarily as a punitive law, with research activities such as collecting samples often treated in the same way as hunting, making permits necessary even for scientific work. Despite efforts over the past two decades to explicitly facilitate research under the Act, these changes have not materialised. This disproportionately affects those without institutional privilege or the resources to navigate the system. Conservation science needs to accommodate a wider range of researchers, replacing excessive top-down control with a system that enables diverse participation.