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Common survey to count India’s elephant and tiger populations

  • Posted By
    10Pointer
  • Categories
    Environment
  • Published
    13th Aug, 2021

Context

India will move to a system to count tigers and elephants as part of a common survey from 2022. The tiger survey is held once in four years and elephants are counted once in five years.

  • The announcement was made on World Elephant Day.

About the counting survey for elephant

  • Since 2006, the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), Dehradun, an affiliated body to the Environment Ministry, has a standardized protocol in place to estimate tiger numbers.
  • Elephant numbers are largely relying on States directly counting the number of elephants.
  • According to the last count in 2017, there were 29,964 elephants in India.

Conservation Status

  • Asian elephants are listed as "Endangered" animals on the IUCN Red List of threatened species.
  • More than 60 % of the population is held in India.
  • Indian Elephant is also listed in Appendix I of the Convention of the Migratory species in the Conference of Parties of CMS 13 at Gandhi Nagar, Gujarat in February 2020.
  • World Elephant Day is also celebrated to bring the attention of various stakeholders to support various conservation policies to help elephants.
  • The elephant is alsoa Natural Heritage Animal of India.

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