Beyond the Tigers Fixing the Structural Fractures in India’s Biodiversity Conservation Regime
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: India, a global biodiversity powerhouse, harbours four of the world’s 36 biodiversity hotspots — the Himalayas, Western Ghats, Indo-Burma, and Sundaland — along with an estimated 45,000 plant species and over 91,000 animal species. Yet this wealth is eroding: South Asia’s Living Planet Index shows a steep four-decade decline in vertebrate populations, despite India’s ratification of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and its enactment of the Wildlife (Protection) Act (1972), Forest (Conservation) Act (1980), and Biological Diversity Act (2002). This paper argues that the paradox is best understood not as a series of unrelated failures but as six recurring structural disconnects that run through India’s conservation architecture: a jurisdictional disconnect (mandates split across at least fourteen central ministries, epitomized by governance paralysis at Chilika Lake); a species-ecosystem disconnect (a charismatic-species bias, inherited from Project Tiger’s success, that leaves wetlands, grasslands and marine habitats under-resourced); a state-community disconnect (a fortress-conservation model that has displaced over 600,000 Adivasi families since 1947, even where community-managed landscapes out-perform formal Protected Areas); a science-policy disconnect (generalist administration, compromised Environmental Impact Assessments, and the sidelining of the Gadgil Report); an incentive disconnect (revenue-based forest metrics and a Rs. 50,000-crore compensatory-afforestation regime whose plantation-heavy implementation has often fallen short of restoring natural forest); and a temporal disconnect (static, boundary-bound Protected Areas that cannot track climate-driven range shifts). Read together, these disconnects rather than any single failure explain why India’s considerable legal and institutional investment has not translated into commensurate ecological outcomes. The paper is deliberately not a story of uniform failure. Project Tiger’s population recovery, the growth of Community and Conservation Reserves, functioning State Biodiversity Boards such as Kerala’s, a growing number of notified Biodiversity Heritage Sites, and rare but real Access and Benefit-Sharing successes — notably the Kani tribe–TBGRI arrangement — show that India’s architecture can work when incentives, science and community authority are aligned. The paper examines the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation’s (MSSRF) three-decade programme of operationalizing People’s Biodiversity Registers and Biodiversity Management Committees as a case study in bridging these disconnects in practice. It further situates India’s governance debate within emerging global themes — Nature Positive commitments, Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures (OECMs), large-scale ecosystem restoration, biodiversity finance, digital sequence information (DSI) and AI-enabled biodiversity monitoring, and nature-related business disclosure regimes — that are reshaping international expectations of national biodiversity governance. The paper closes with reforms mapped explicitly onto each of the six disconnects: a strengthened National Biodiversity Authority; full Forest Rights Act implementation; faithful enforcement of existing ecological-expertise and EIA safeguards in decision-making bodies; incentive reform in CAMPA implementation and in forest-service metrics; aquatic parity through expanded marine protection and a Wetlands Authority; and climate-adaptive corridor planning. Together, these can forge governance that finally matches India’s biological wealth with its institutional capacity.
Authors: Dr NR Jagannath, Dr Nisha Priya Mani
Language: English
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7225626146
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