Poaching Biggest Threat to Global Tiger Population, Indian Official Says

The world pledged to double the global tiger population before 2022 during the First Global Tiger Summit held in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2010. However, in 2018, India claimed that it reached its target four years before the deadline.

Satya Prakash Yadav, the secretary of the National Tiger Conservation Authority of India, told Sputnik on the sidelines of the Second Global Tiger Summit in Vladivostok that there is an urgent need to prevent tiger poaching, as the animals have disappeared in many countries since 2010.

Speaking at the second Global Tiger Summit, which is currently being held in Vladivostok, Satya Prakash Yadav, who is a member of India's Tiger Conservation Authority, told Sputnik that, "Globally, the population is worrisome. But India is the largest home to the tiger in the world and is doing very well in conserving wild cats."

Currently, India houses 80 percent of the global tiger population.

However, Yadav stressed that India and Russia should learn from each other to conserve tiger populations.

He also said that India has formed the National Tiger Conservation Authority, an organization that dedicatedly works for all aspects of tiger conservation and is funded by the Indian government.

"We have a network of 52 tiger reserves in the country, covering the area of roughly 75,000 square kilometres. We are involving the community and other stakeholders taking their support in tiger conservation. We are using technology for monitoring, for anti-poaching activities and all such, something other nations should learn from us," he said.

However, Yadav argued that poaching remains one of the biggest threats to the wild cats, not just in India but globally.

"After 2010, the First International Tiger Forum, several countries lost all their tigers just because of poaching, including Cambodia, Vietnam and the People's Democratic Republic of Lao, and poaching remains a big threat. That's a big issue and needs to be tackled very strongly," he said.