Tiger, tiger, burning bright! Apologies William Blake for the misspelling and the attention-seeking exclamation mark, but the tigers of India are shining in the dark indeed—on the pages of Guinness World Records, at least. A shining example of Aatmanirbhar Bharat, as environment minister Prakash Javadekar put it after Guinness acknowledged that the fourth cycle of the All India Tiger Estimation 2018 is the world’s largest camera trap wildlife survey. Camera traps were placed at 26,838 locations spread across the country and they took 76,651 photographs of tigers. Stripe-pattern-recognition software helped identify individuals from that pile of photos.
The census estimated 2,967 tigers, which means India has 75 per cent of the global tiger population. That also means India doubled its count four years before its 2022 target—set at the first-ever global tiger summit in St Petersburg in 2010. Sankalp se Sidhi, an anthemic “attainment through resolve” programme, was the mantra that drove hundreds of officials and volunteers on the trail of one of...
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