India's Tiger Reintroduction to Cambodia: A Roaring Future

India plans to send four tigers to Cambodia by November-December to reintroduce the species into Cambodian forests. This follows the first transnational tiger reintroduction pact signed with Phnom Penh in 2022. Continuous dialogue and detailed action plans are under review to ensure successful reintroduction.

India is likely to send four tigers to Cambodia by November-December to help reintroduce the big cats in the country's forests, sources said on Friday.

New Delhi signed a pact with Phnom Penh for the world's first transnational tiger reintroduction project in November 2022.

Officials from Cambodia, the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the Indian ambassador to Cambodia, Devyani Khobragade, participated in an online meeting a few days ago and discussed the proposal to send four tigers to Cambodia by November-December. However, a final decision is pending, a source said.

''There is continuous dialogue with Cambodian officials regarding the proposal. The NTCA has requested them to send a detailed action plan. The same will be examined and placed before the technical committee,'' NTCA Member-Secretary Gobind Sagar Bharadwaj told PTI.

An appropriate decision will be taken by the competent authority based on the technical committee's recommendations, he added.

Another source said the plan is to send four tigers -- one male and three females -- from India's Western Ghats to the Cardamom Hills in the southwestern region of Cambodia.

According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), conservationists in Cambodia declared tigers ''functionally extinct'' in 2016. Cambodia's last tiger was seen on a camera trap in the eastern province of Mondulkiri in 2007. In September 2017, the Cambodian government announced plans to reintroduce tigers in the country with the help of the WWF.

Cambodia lost all its tigers due to poaching, habitat loss and other factors. India is ensuring that all factors responsible for this are addressed and that conditions are conducive for the reintroduction of tigers, the first source said.

Officials had earlier said the two countries would follow all the protocols of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) for the tiger reintroduction programme.

The number of tigers in India stood at 3,682 in 2022, according to the latest government data. This is around 75 per cent of the global wild tiger population.

India launched Project Tiger on April 1, 1973 to promote tiger conservation. Initially, it covered nine tiger reserves spread over 18,278 square kilometres. Currently, India has 55 tiger reserves covering more than 78,735 sq.km (approximately 2.4 per cent of the country's geographical area) of the tiger habitat.

Countries with tiger populations -- India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Russia, Thailand and Vietnam -- took a pledge in 2010 to double their numbers of the big cats by 2022. India doubled its tiger population in 2018, four years ahead of the target.

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