IWN Report — Friday, 25 September 2026

India’s Union Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change told delegates from more than 100 countries in Jaipur on Monday that India’s Ramsar-listed wetlands have grown from 24 to 101 in a decade, using the opening of the World Wide Fund for Nature‘s Global Conservation Conference to lay out the government’s own scorecard on habitat protection.

The Numbers

According to a statement from the Press Information Bureau, the minister put India’s protected areas at just over 1,000 today, up from roughly 750 a decade ago. Tiger reserves have grown from 47 to 58 over the same period, and elephant reserves from 30 to 33.

He also pointed to India’s cheetah reintroduction programme and a captive-breeding effort for the critically endangered Great Indian Bustard in Rajasthan as further examples of the approach paying off, alongside recovery work on the greater one-horned rhinoceros and the wild water buffalo, both concentrated in Assam.

He called India’s approach to conservation “both constitutional and cultural,” predating the modern language of protected-area law, and tied the figures to the country’s standing in international agreements including CITES, the Convention on Migratory Species and the Convention on Biological Diversity. He asked delegates to “act on conservation and coexistence” and turn India’s approach into a template other countries could adapt.

The World Wide Fund for Nature, founded in 1961, brought its Global Conservation Conference to Jaipur with representatives from more than 100 countries in the room.

Sources: Press Information Bureau