IWN Original Report — Tuesday, 28 July 2026
In the three weeks before India marks International Tiger Day, four separate high-level wildlife meetings took place in the same city, each announcing a policy move of its own.
The venue was a forestry training campus in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, which briefly became the centre of India’s conservation policy. The Union Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change chaired all four sessions, held on 9 and 10 July.
Rescue Roadmap
The National Tiger Conservation Authority released two documents at its meeting. The first, Roadmap to Rescue, sets out a strategic framework for building temporary and transit facilities to rescue, rehabilitate and release wild animals across tiger landscapes — infrastructure many reserves have so far had to improvise on their own.
The second, STRIDES 2026, is a stock-take of every tiger reserve in the country: infrastructure, ecology, development pressure, social parameters. The Authority also signed off on its 2024–25 annual report and opened discussion on a sixth cycle of Management Effectiveness Evaluation, the audit that grades how well each reserve is actually run.
It also began planning a Tiger Conclave, a platform to raise corporate and philanthropic funding for reserves through Tiger Conservation Foundations.
DNA Tracking
The Standing Committee of the National Board for Wildlife discussed a long-term conservation strategy for the greater one-horned rhinoceros built around the Rhino DNA Indexing System, which profiles individual rhinos genetically rather than relying on field tallies that can double-count or miss an animal altogether. Indian agencies have used the system against poaching gangs since 2016, developed jointly by the Environment Ministry, the Wildlife Institute of India and WWF-India; folding it into a formal national strategy is new.
The committee also discussed a conservation strategy for the Great Indian Bustard, among the heaviest birds still capable of flight, and brought the pygmy hog, confined almost entirely to a handful of Assam’s grasslands, under the national Species Recovery Programme. It released fresh scientific publications on the rhinoceros, the sloth bear and the bustard.
It also reviewed 118 infrastructure and defence proposals — roads, power lines, mining, optical fibre — for wildlife clearance.
Conflict Centre
The same days brought a new Centre of Excellence on Human–Wildlife Conflict at WII-SACON, Coimbatore — a joint facility of the Wildlife Institute of India and the Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History (SACON) — alongside a National Human–Wildlife Conflict Portal for tracking incidents and sharing data across states — something forest departments have largely managed on paper until now. Its brief includes drafting policy for tigers outside reserve boundaries, and for leopards and elephants near human settlements, where rules currently vary sharply by state.
The same week, National CAMPA‘s governing body approved four new conservation projects — for river dolphins, snow leopards, wild water buffalo and the Indian rhinoceros — and renewed support for Manipur’s brow-antlered deer, the sangai, a species that survives nowhere on Earth outside one floating marsh in a single lake.
Sources: Press Information Bureau — National Tiger Conservation Authority · Press Information Bureau — Centre of Excellence on Human-Wildlife Conflict · Press Information Bureau — National CAMPA Governing Body · Standing Committee of NBWL, 91st Meeting · Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change