Sariska Tiger Reserve

Sariska Tiger Reserve lies in the Aravalli hills of Alwar district, Rajasthan, and occupies a place in Indian conservation history disproportionate to its modest size. The area was declared a wildlife sanctuary in 1955 and brought under Project Tiger as a tiger reserve in 1978, the umbrella scheme launched by the Government of India in 1973 to arrest the collapse of the national tiger population. In 1982 the core zone was notified as Sariska National Park. Its legal protection derives from the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, under which sanctuaries and national parks are constituted, and from Section 38V of that Act, inserted by the 2006 amendment, which provides the statutory basis for tiger reserves and their core and buffer demarcation. Administration falls to the Rajasthan Forest Department, with oversight from the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), the statutory body created by the same 2006 amendment in the aftermath of events at Sariska itself.

The reserve's defining episode was the discovery, confirmed in 2004 and publicly acknowledged in 2005, that Sariska had lost its entire tiger population — an estimated number that had stood at roughly two dozen in the late 1990s had fallen to zero, primarily through organised poaching. The revelation triggered a national reckoning. The Prime Minister constituted the Tiger Task Force in 2005, whose report, Joining the Dot, recommended structural reforms in tiger governance. These culminated in the 2006 amendment to the Wildlife (Protection) Act, which converted Project Tiger's advisory steering committee into the statutory NTCA and created the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau. Sariska thus functioned as the proximate cause of the modern legal architecture governing all of India's tiger reserves.

In 2008 Sariska became the site of the country's first tiger reintroduction programme. Tigers were translocated from Ranthambore Tiger Reserve, also in Rajasthan, using helicopter and road transport under tranquilisation, fitted with radio collars for monitoring. The first male and female were relocated in June and July 2008. The experiment suffered an early reversal when the first translocated male, designated ST-1, was poisoned in 2010, demonstrating that reintroduction without addressing the underlying drivers of extinction — village presence inside the core, livestock grazing, and inadequate enforcement — could not succeed. Subsequent translocations and natural breeding gradually rebuilt the population, which crossed into the twenties by the early 2020s, though the reserve continues to record losses.

Contemporary management centres on a persistent and politically sensitive problem: the relocation of villages from the critical tiger habitat. Several villages, including Bhagani, Kankwari, and Umri, lie within or near the core, and the NTCA's guidelines require an inviolate core free of human habitation. The Rajasthan government has offered relocation packages under the centrally sponsored scheme administered through the NTCA, but resettlement has proceeded unevenly. A further controversy concerns the Pandupol Hanuman temple inside the reserve, which draws large pilgrim crowds and vehicular traffic on Tuesdays and Saturdays, generating friction between religious access guaranteed in practice and the legal requirement to minimise human disturbance in the core. Mining in the Aravallis adjacent to the reserve has repeatedly drawn the attention of the Supreme Court of India, which ordered closures of illegal operations in the buffer.

Sariska must be distinguished from adjacent concepts in the protected-area lexicon. A tiger reserve is an administrative designation under Project Tiger and Section 38V, comprising a legally notified core (treated as a national park or sanctuary) and a buffer zone; it is not itself a separate category of legal land but an overlay on existing sanctuaries and parks. Sariska should not be conflated with Ranthambore, the source population for its reintroduction, nor with a biosphere reserve, which is a UNESCO Man and the Biosphere designation with a different zonation philosophy emphasising sustainable use. Nor is the reserve a community reserve or conservation reserve, the two categories introduced by the 2002 amendment for lands outside the strict park-sanctuary framework.

Recent developments keep Sariska in the policy foreground. The reserve repeatedly features in NTCA evaluations as a case where habitat connectivity to the Aravalli landscape and the Jaipur–Delhi corridor is compromised by highways, including National Highway sections that bisect tiger movement routes, raising the question of wildlife underpasses and overpasses. Proposals to denotify portions of the buffer for mining and tourism infrastructure have drawn objections from conservationists and judicial scrutiny. The all-India tiger estimation exercises conducted quadrennially by the NTCA and the Wildlife Institute of India track Sariska's recovery, which remains fragile and dependent on continued enforcement, prey-base augmentation, and the slow progress of village relocation.

For the working practitioner — the civil-services aspirant, the environment desk officer, or the policy researcher — Sariska is the indispensable case study in Indian conservation governance because it links a concrete failure to a concrete institutional reform. It demonstrates how the loss of a single reserve's tiger population precipitated the statutory creation of the NTCA and the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau, why inviolate core zones and village relocation are legal imperatives rather than discretionary preferences, and how reintroduction biology, enforcement, and human-wildlife conflict intersect. In UPSC General Studies Paper III, Sariska anchors questions on Project Tiger, the 2006 amendment, and the broader tension between conservation and the rights of forest-dependent communities under the Forest Rights Act, 2006.