Project Tiger, Launched at Corbett on 1 April 1973 With Nine Reserves and Kailash Sankhala as First Director, Now Covers 58 Tiger Reserves and More Than 84,000 Square Kilometres

On 1 April 1973 the Government of India launched Project Tiger at Corbett, then in Uttar Pradesh, with nine tiger reserves in nine states and Kailash Sankhala, a forest officer from Jodhpur, as its first director. The Press Information Bureau (PIB), the government’s own news service, gives that date and place and lists the nine reserves. The blueprint was a task force report delivered in August 1972. As of 5 November 2026 the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) lists 58 tiger reserves.

What the task force was asked to fix

Several steps came before the launch. PIB’s account says the Indian Board for Wild Life met in New Delhi in July 1969 and recommended a total ban on exporting the skins of wild cats, tigers included. The same year the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) held its 10th General Assembly in Delhi and listed the tiger in its Red Data Book as endangered. According to the Tiger Task Force report of 2005, the assembly’s call for a pause on killing tigers rested on an assessment by Sankhala, and the Board then asked states to ban tiger hunting for five years.

The dates of the hunting ban vary by source. The Ashoka University archive, which holds Sankhala’s papers, says the Board banned tiger hunting across India by July 1970. Down To Earth’s 1994 obituary of Sankhala says 1969. A note from the journal Oryx in September 1972, summarised in a later issue, reports that tiger hunting had already been banned across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan.

The count itself was a pugmark census, in which forest staff cast the footprints of individual tigers in plaster and compared them. The 2005 task force report says the first such all-India census, in April and May 1972, put the number near 1,800 and was probably an underestimate, because early monsoon rains kept it out of the Sundarbans and Assam. The Project Tiger directorate’s table in the same report gives 1,827 for 1972, split in the table into 268 in tiger reserves and 1,559 outside them.

Karan Singh’s task force and the August 1972 report

Guy Mountfort, a trustee of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), met Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1972 and urged her to act, according to the 2005 report and WWF India. She set up a group of specialists chaired by Karan Singh, whom an Oryx note of the time describes as Minister of Tourism and Civil Aviation. PIB says the Board’s executive committee formed an 11-member task force. The group reported in August 1972. A Tribune account by Lt Gen Baljit Singh (Retd) adds that the Prime Minister then took the chair of a steering committee, with Karan Singh as vice-chairman and Sankhala as director, and launched the project from Corbett herself.

Its report, in the words of the 2005 task force, set out management systems, an administrative framework, legal provisions, anti-poaching measures and a list of the equipment a reserve would need. The plan was first written for six years, from April 1973 to March 1979. Its stated aim was to maintain a viable tiger population in India and to preserve such areas for all time as part of the national heritage.

The task force proposed eight reserves, each chosen to represent a different ecosystem. It set a reserve at an average of about 1,500 square kilometres, with a core of at least 300 square kilometres where felling, grazing and human movement would stop except for management. Around the core would sit a buffer zone with limited human activity. The mangrove forest of the Sundarbans was added when the project was formally launched, which made nine.

On funding, Oryx reported that WWF had promised US$1 million if the Indian government took the necessary conservation measures, and that the WWF money would pay for items needing foreign currency, such as helicopters and two-way radios for controlling poaching. Sanctuary Nature Foundation’s account says two million dollars were collected after WWF’s appeal. The two figures are not reconciled in the sources opened for this article.

The nine reserves of 1973

PIB’s list of the first nine, with the states as they stood in 1973, runs: Corbett (Uttar Pradesh), Palamau (Bihar), Similipal (Orissa), Sundarbans (West Bengal), Manas (Assam), Ranthambhore (Rajasthan), Kanha (Madhya Pradesh), Melghat (Maharashtra) and Bandipur (Mysore). Corbett is now in Uttarakhand, Palamau in Jharkhand, Similipal in Odisha and Bandipur in Karnataka. The NTCA’s list gives all nine a protected-area notification year of 1973 to 1974.

Mountfort’s May 1973 article describes them as they looked at the time. Bandipur, the smallest, had a 56 square kilometre sanctuary plus 160 square kilometres of reserved forest and 18 tigers. Corbett had about 30 tigers, Ranthambhore’s last census listed 36 and Melghat had 42. The plan was to enlarge several of them and to build each up to at least 100 tigers. Oryx also records that some village settlements inside the reserves were to be moved and that hunting would be banned in a buffer 6 km deep.

The NTCA and Wildlife Institute of India’s 2022 summary report says Project Tiger began with nine reserves covering 18,278 square kilometres. Adding the areas the NTCA’s list gives for those nine reserves today comes to the same figure. Two of them have their own articles on this site: the Sundarbans and Manas.

Kailash Sankhala, the first director

The Ashoka University archive and The Better India both place Sankhala’s birth in 1925, and The Better India says it was in Jodhpur. He studied botany at Jaswant College in Jodhpur and took a postgraduate diploma at the Indian Forest College in Dehradun, and he joined the forest service in the 1950s. The sources differ on the year, 1953 in Down To Earth and 1957 in the archive. Down To Earth says he shot one tiger near Sariska and never another.

From 1965 to 1970 he directed the Delhi Zoological Park. The archive says he presented a paper called The Vanishing Tiger at the 1969 IUCN assembly in Delhi and was the first civil servant to receive a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship, in 1969, to study the tiger. By the late 1960s he had put the national total at about 2,500, one of several educated guesses from credible experts, in the 2005 task force’s words. Down To Earth says his report The Status of the Tiger in India, built on hunting records and fieldwork, argued that without urgent action to save its habitat the tiger faced extinction.

He ran Project Tiger from 1973, and the archive calls him its founder-director. Down To Earth says he often described his ideal as to “do nothing and not let anybody do anything”, meaning that the emphasis was on keeping human activity out of the core. He then returned to Rajasthan as chief wildlife warden, and Down To Earth credits him with creating the Desert National Park in Bikaner and Jaisalmer. The Ashoka archive gives 1978 for his return to Rajasthan and 1983 for his retirement, and lists his book Tiger! The Story of the Indian Tiger among his best-known works. The Government of India gave him the Padma Shri in 1992, the archive records, and he died on 15 August 1994, aged 69, according to Down To Earth.

In a 1992 paper for an international conference on national parks, Down To Earth reports, he argued that conservation could not succeed unless it was tuned to the needs of people. The archive quotes him saying that his entire life had been a tiger project and that the birth of Project Tiger was its culmination.

From nine reserves to 58

The network grew in steps. The 2005 task force report records that Periyar and Sariska were added in 1978, and Buxa, Indravati, Namdapha and Nagarjunasagar-Srisailam in 1982, giving 15 reserves covering 24,712 square kilometres by the early 1980s. By 1989 there were 19 reserves covering 29,716 square kilometres, and by 2005 there were 28 reserves covering 37,761 square kilometres across 17 states.

The same table of the Project Tiger directorate shows the number of tigers counted inside reserves rising from 268 in 1972 to 711 in 1979, 1,121 in 1984 and 1,327 in 1989. Those figures cover a network that kept growing, so they do not compare like with like. In its review of the programme’s first two decades, the Union environment ministry wrote in 1993 that “Project Tiger saved the tiger from extinction in the nick of time”, a line the 2005 task force quotes.

The NTCA’s list, last updated on 5 November 2026, now has 58 reserves. Madhav in Madhya Pradesh, notified in 2025, is the last entry. The NTCA’s figures add up to 84,487.83 square kilometres, of which 46,701.29 are core and 37,786.54 are buffer. The 2022 summary report counted 53 reserves covering 75,796 square kilometres, 2.3 per cent of India’s land area, and PIB’s July 2024 note counted 54.

On 9 April 2023, PIB records, the Prime Minister inaugurated the commemoration of 50 years of Project Tiger at Mysuru University, released a commemorative coin and a summary report of the fifth tiger estimation, and launched the International Big Cats Alliance.

Becoming a statutory authority

After tigers disappeared from Sariska, which the Wildlife Institute of India confirmed in 2005, the government appointed a task force chaired by Sunita Narain. Its report, Joining the Dots, was submitted in 2005. PIB says amendments to the Wildlife (Protection) Act in 2006 then created the NTCA and the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau as statutory bodies. PIB describes the effect as turning Project Tiger from a funding scheme into a reciprocal commitment between the Centre, the states and each reserve’s field director. The NTCA describes Project Tiger today as a Centrally Sponsored Scheme that funds tiger range states for protection, habitat work, monitoring and voluntary relocation of people from core areas.

Money for the first three decades is on record in the 2005 report. The Centre gave Rs 172.65 crore to the reserves from 1973 to 2002 and 2003, and with the states’ share to March 2004 the total came to Rs 373 crore.

What the later counts show

The NTCA and Wildlife Institute of India date a second phase of tiger conservation to 2005 and 2006, when the country moved to landscape-level work and stricter monitoring. Their summary report records the all-India estimate rising from 1,411 in 2006 to 2,967 in 2018. For the 2022 cycle PIB gives a minimum of 3,167 tigers, an average estimate of 3,682, an upper limit of 3,925 and an annual growth rate of 6.1 per cent. The methods changed in 2006, so the 1972 pugmark count and the later camera-trap estimates are not directly comparable. How India counts its tigers explains the difference, and what the three 2022 numbers mean has the detail.

The summary report also lists the pressures that remain. It says most tiger reserves and protected areas exist as small islands in a large area of unsustainable land use, and that the habitat corridors between them are mostly outside protected areas. For one of the nine reserves, see Kanha and its barasingha. The 2005 task force report found that over half of the 3,642 tigers recorded in the 2001 to 2002 census lived outside reserves.