India's tiger census from 2018 is now a Guinness world record!

A 2018 census to map and work on preserving tiger population in India has made it to the Guinness Book of World Records. Now, this effort is officially the world’s largest wildlife survey being conducted on cameras.

According to data from the All India Tiger Estimation from 2018, around 2,967 tigers exist in India, which amounts to a whopping 75 per cent of the global tiger population.This data was unveiled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Global Tiger Day in 2019, which is celebrated to raise awareness about tiger conservation every year on July 29.

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The achievement was acknowledged by the Union Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar, who tweeted, "The All India Tiger Estimation is now in the Guinness World Records for being the largest camera trap wildlife survey, a great moment indeed and a shining example of Aatmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India)."

Attainment through resolve

Calling it the achievement based on “sankalp se sidhi” (translates into “attainment through resolve”), the minister claimed that this was attained under the leadership of Modi, whereby the country was able to double the number of tigers way before the target. To be exact, the numbers came to fruition four years before the envisaged plan.

The website of the Guinness World Records said, "The fourth iteration of the survey - conducted in 2018-19 - was the most comprehensive to date, in terms of both resource and data amassed. Camera traps (outdoor photographic devices fitted with motion sensors that start recording when an animal passes by) were placed in 26,838 locations across 141 different sites and surveyed an effective area of 121,337 square kilometres (46,848 square miles)."

According to Guinness, the cameras have taken 34,000,000+ pictures of animals in their natural habitats. Through these images, 2,461 unique tigers were identified. "In total, the camera traps captured 34,858,623 photographs of wildlife (76,651 of which were tigers and 51,777 were leopards; the remainder were other native fauna). From these photographs, 2,461 individual tigers (excluding cubs) were identified using stripe-pattern-recognition software."

The conservation project aimed at tigers began as early as 1973, under the name “Project Tiger”, and was heralded by late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.