An Elegy for the Untamed: India’s Wildlife at the Tipping Point

There is a sound the world used to know, a something between a hymn and a warning that rose from India’s wild places at dusk. It was the low, territorial rumble of a tiger settling into the long grass; the sudden, staccato alarm of a snipe skittering from marsh to sky; a chorus of frogs that stitched the night together like a slow, living metronome. Walk into a forest in the right season, and you could feel the land breathing through its animals. That breath is changing.

Stand very still under a banyan and you might notice first the small things: one less crow calling from the branch, the empty pause where a koel used to answer; leaves that fall without a beetle’s flash. Then the absences scale up: fewer pug marks on the mud, an oxbow lake without the familiar silhouette of a mugger crocodile, a riverbank where the river dolphins once trilled, now telling only the sound of engineers’ shovels at work. The silence is not peaceful. It is a thin, brittle thing that hums with the absence of what we have lost.

We are not losing wildlife in abstract numbers. We are losing anchor points of our world, the pollinators that turn seed into harvest, the apex predators that keep grazers from overgrazing our commons, the scavengers that clean disease from the margins. When an animal vanishes, something else frays: a farmer’s yield, a village’s flood protection, a story a grandmother could tell her grandchild. Extinction is not a headline; it is a transfer of the future into the past.

Across India, this silence arrives in many guises. In the grasslands of the Deccan, an odd quiet takes hold where bustards used to boom at dawn. In the Sundarbans, tigers no longer pad along paths that were their corridors for centuries; storm surges and embankment breaches have rearranged their maps of survival. The Western Ghats, once a layered orchestra of endemic frogs and birds, now plays thin, as microhabitats vanish under coffee estates and villas. Far from being a problem ‘out there’ in remote sanctuaries, the decay of wildness touches cities and fields alike: pollinator decline ripples into poorer yields; changing predator distributions bring more conflict to the village edge; the loss of riverine species turns floodplains into uncertain ground.

It is tempting and comfortable to blame a single villain. Poachers, yes; the black market in horns, skins, and scales is a crime against flesh and culture. But the story is wider and more frightening because it implicates everyday choices. Roads ribboning through forests, built to shrink travel time between towns, become kill zones for elephants at night. Poorly planned linear projects fracture animal corridors into islands. Mines and quarries devour the ground, leaving scarred moons where forests once fed groundwater and soothed temperatures. Intensive agriculture strips soils and reduces insect life. Urban expansion eats away at edge habitats until the city is an advancing tide and the wild is a shrinking archipelago. Climate change then turns these pressures into a pincer: hotter summers, drier winters, shifting monsoons, a set of stressors that push species already pressed by habitat loss into collapse.

This prologue is not an elegy written only for sadness. It is an alarm bell. The urgency is not simply that tigers are fewer or cranes migrate at different times; the urgency is that we are approaching tipping points where ecosystems collapse in ways that are hard to reverse. Certain keystone species — the elephant as a landscape architect, the vulture as the scavenger that keeps carcass-borne disease low- do work that cannot be replaced by technology. When those species disappear, the consequences cascade across human lives: water tables crash, zoonotic disease risks rise, and the small security that poor communities counted on disappears.

Listen also to the human voices that sit within this story. In a village tucked against a reserve, a woman remembers harvesting tubers while birds wheeled above; her grandchildren see instead a scrubland where fires now sweep. A forest guard, his face weathered from years of night patrols, will tell you about the clever traps laid by miners and the way policing seems like a paper tiger against networks with money and guns. An urban planner may speak of housing shortages and the irresistible economics of converting a protected patch into high-rise lots. None of these stories cancel each other out; together they form the ledger of how the wild is being traded away.

This is why the essay that follows must be both forensic and elegiac. We must map the numbers and name the causes, the policies that enabled logging, the financial incentives that rewarded short-term extraction, the gaps in enforcement that turned laws into wallpaper. But we must also place the human heart at the centre, for conservation fails when it excludes the dignity and the livelihoods of the people who live beside the wild. The forest speaks in both the language of loss and the language of hope; it is to that double dialect we must learn to listen.

There is still time, but it is not generous. Biological systems recover slowly and nonlinearly. A planted grove is not the same as an old-growth forest. A reintroduced predator cannot rebuild a web overnight. The decisions India makes, now about roads, about rivers, about which lands to set aside and which to sacrifice, will be recorded in the absence of our grandchildren's inheritance. This opening section is our summons: the forests are speaking, often in the small silences we ignore. If we do not answer, their silence will harden into a history written without footprints.

Section I — The Anatomy of Extinction: Why Our Wild Neighbours Are Vanishing

Extinction is not a thunderclap. It is a slow dimming of light, a gradual loss of sounds, a scattering of shadows that once moved confidently through the land. By the time the final individual of a species is mourned, the decline has usually unfolded over decades, often centuries, masked by the noise of human ambition. To truly grasp the urgency, we must dissect the anatomy of extinction, the layered, interwoven causes that push species from abundance to scarcity, from scarcity to crisis, and finally into memory.

Habitat Loss: The Erosion of Home

The first and most merciless driver of extinction is habitat destruction. Forests, wetlands, mangroves, grasslands, these are not just scenic landscapes; they are homes, nurseries, and kitchens for countless species.

Deforestation: India loses thousands of hectares of forest annually to mining, infrastructure, and agriculture. The Aravallis bleed into stone quarries, the Chhattisgarh Sal forests into coal pits, the Northeast’s shifting green into highways. Each felled grove pushes elephants into farmlands and leopards into cities.
Wetland Drainage: Cities like Delhi, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru once thrived on the sponge-like wetlands that absorbed floods and hosted migratory birds. As these vanish under concrete, the bar-headed goose, the sarus crane, and even common frogs are robbed of their seasonal refuge.
Grassland Neglect: Misclassified as “wastelands” in policy documents, grasslands, the habitats of the great Indian bustard, blackbuck, and wolf, are ploughed under or turned into solar parks. Yet grasslands are biodiversity powerhouses, storing carbon and anchoring food webs.

Habitat loss does not just reduce numbers; it fragments populations. A tiger cut off from its corridor cannot reach a mate. A herd of elephants stranded by a highway cannot forage widely. Genetic diversity collapses, resilience fades, and extinction accelerates.

Poaching and Illegal Trade: Death for Profit

The poacher’s bullet is often the most visible villain. Tigers for their skins and bones, pangolins for their scales, rhinos for their horn, star tortoises for the pet trade, the catalogue of greed is long.

India’s wildlife laws are strong on paper, but enforcement struggles against organized networks. A pangolin scale can fetch thousands of dollars in international markets; poachers armed with modern rifles and drones outpace poorly equipped guards. Beyond the big-ticket species, smaller, quieter victims fall too: owls for black magic rituals, monitor lizards for meat, songbirds for cages.

The tragedy of poaching is not just the death of one animal but the unravelling of ecological roles. A tiger lost means deer populations balloon, damaging crops and forests. A vulture-poisoned wipes out the sanitation system of the wild, leaving carcasses to rot and diseases to spread.

Climate Change: A Heat the Wild Cannot Outrun

Animals evolved to rhythms of monsoon and drought, flood and dry, cool and warm. Climate change smashes those rhythms.

Rising Temperatures: High-altitude species like the snow leopard and red panda are squeezed further upward as lower ranges warm, until there is nowhere left to go.
Erratic Monsoons: Frogs, toads, and reptiles time their breeding to the first rains. When rains come late or in destructive bursts, eggs desiccate or are washed away.
Sea-Level Rise: The Sundarbans, the largest mangrove forest and home to the Bengal tiger, is losing ground to encroaching seas. Salinity creeps inland, altering plant and fish life, leaving tigers and humans scrambling for space.
Phenological Mismatch: Birds like the pied cuckoo migrate in sync with the monsoon. As rainfall patterns shift, their journeys misalign with insect abundance, leaving chicks hungry.

Unlike humans, most animals cannot “adapt” by changing jobs or building walls. Evolution is slow; climate change is fast. The mismatch is lethal.

Pollution: A Poisoned Landscape

The modern world leaks toxins into every niche. Rivers foaming with industrial effluents kill fish and amphibians. Plastics choke turtles, deer, and even cows. Air pollution alters insect behaviour, disrupting pollination. Pesticides devastate bee and butterfly populations, which in turn collapses fruit and seed production.

Consider the Ganga River dolphin, India’s national aquatic animal. Once thriving, it now struggles against sand mining, dams that block its migratory paths, and chemical runoff that poisons its prey. The dolphin is not dying in spectacular massacres but through a chronic suffocation, an extinction by a thousand pollutants.

Human-Wildlife Conflict: A War on the Edge

As habitats shrink and fragment, animals and humans collide at their edges. Elephants raid crops when their traditional corridors are blocked. Leopards enter villages in search of stray dogs. Crocodiles bask on sandbanks that fishermen also use. The result: loss of life on both sides.

Communities dependent on farming see wildlife as an enemy rather than a shared neighbour. Retaliatory killings are poisoned fruits for elephants, snares for leopards. Conservation becomes a contested word when human survival is pitted against animal presence.

The Shadow of Indifference

Perhaps the most corrosive cause of extinction is indifference. For many urban citizens, wildlife is reduced to television documentaries or safari snapshots. Policy debates often place wildlife as an afterthought, secondary to development. When public memory erases the presence of a species, its decline becomes invisible until it is irreversible.

Extinction, then, is not one wound but a web of wounds, some sharp and deliberate, others slow and structural. And it is always interconnected: a poisoned stream kills fish, which starves birds, which forces predators to stray into villages, which provokes conflict, which invites retaliatory poisonings, which erases vultures, which spreads disease.

This anatomy is sobering. But to stare only at causes without hope would be another kind of violence. In the next section, we must turn to the heartbeat of resilience, the efforts, from grassroots to global, that try to stitch wildness back into our future.

Section II — The Frontlines of Conservation: Resistance, Revival, and Renewal

If extinction is a story of wounds, conservation is a story of healing. Across India and the world, small armies of rangers, scientists, villagers, and dreamers rise each morning to defend what cannot speak for itself. Their efforts are uneven, sometimes fragile, but together they sketch a map of resilience. These frontlines are not only about saving animals; they are about preserving the very balance of existence.

Guardians of the Forest: The Unsung Rangers

In the dense thickets of Kaziranga, in the dry scrub of Ranthambhore, in the mangroves of the Sundarbans, thousands of forest guards walk patrols with little more than sticks, old rifles, and courage.

They face poachers armed with AK-47s, elephants in musth, tigers protecting cubs, and floods that drown their camps. Many earn modest wages, often without proper insurance. Yet, without their watch, India’s tigers would be skins on walls and rhinos mere myths.

Kaziranga’s rhino population, once decimated by poaching, has revived significantly due to relentless patrolling and shoot-at-sight orders against poachers. These rangers are the thin green line between survival and extinction. Their struggle, though rarely acknowledged, is the backbone of every conservation triumph.

Community Conservation: When Villages Become Sanctuaries

Top-down conservation alone cannot succeed. People who share landscapes with wildlife must see themselves as allies, not adversaries. In parts of Nagaland, once notorious for hunting festivals, entire villages have pledged to protect the Amur falcon, a migratory bird that stops en masse during its long journey from Siberia to Africa. Within a decade, slaughter turned to stewardship; the skies of Pangti now thrum with the wings of a million falcons.

In Rajasthan, Bishnoi communities have defended blackbucks for centuries, considering them sacred. Many have laid down their lives to stop hunters. This ethic of coexistence predates modern wildlife laws, reminding us that conservation is as much cultural as it is ecological.

Legal Shields: The Might of the Courtroom

India’s judiciary has, at crucial moments, acted as a refuge for the voiceless. The Wildlife Protection Act (1972) criminalized hunting and trade in endangered species. The Forest Rights Act (2006) recognized indigenous communities’ role in conserving forests. Courts have banned mining in elephant corridors, restricted tourism zones to protect fragile reserves, and ordered stricter measures against poaching.

Yet, legal shields are often as strong as their enforcement. Paper protection without boots on the ground or trust in communities becomes hollow. Still, in moments of crisis, courts have been crucial in halting projects that threatened sanctuaries, reminding governments that wildlife is not negotiable.

Technology as a New Ally

From satellite collars on snow leopards to drones scanning tiger reserves, technology is reshaping conservation. Artificial intelligence now analyses camera-trap images to identify individual animals. Acoustic sensors detect gunshots in protected areas, alerting rangers in real time.

For example, in the Sundarbans, solar-powered fencing reduces human-tiger conflict by deterring big cats from entering villages. In Gir, Gujarat, camera traps and trackers allow real-time monitoring of Asiatic lions, enabling rapid response to emergencies.

Technology, however, must complement, not replace, the lived wisdom of local communities. The satellite may see the migration of a herd, but only the herder knows why they choose a path.

The Power of Rewilding

Conservation is not only about preventing further loss but also about restoring what was lost. India’s cheetah reintroduction project in Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park, though controversial, is a bold attempt to rewild landscapes. If successful, it could rebalance grassland ecosystems and inspire similar projects for other vanished species.

Smaller, quieter rewilding efforts also matter. In Kerala, community-driven restoration of mangroves has brought back fish nurseries and nesting grounds for birds. In Rajasthan, waterhole creation has stabilized populations of leopards and hyenas. Each act of rewilding is a reminder: absence can be rewritten into presence.

Global Solidarity: From Paris to Pachmarhi

Biodiversity loss is not confined to national borders. Migratory birds cross continents, marine turtles traverse oceans, and climate change knows no passport. International treaties like the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) bind nations to protect shared heritage.

India, as a biodiversity hotspot, plays a crucial role. Its success with tiger conservation, often hailed globally, shows that large carnivores can coexist with a billion people if willpower aligns with science and community engagement. This lesson carries resonance far beyond Indian borders.

The Silent Heroes: NGOs, Scientists, and Artists

Organizations like the Wildlife Trust of India, WWF-India, and Nature Conservation Foundation mobilize resources, research, and advocacy. Scientists like Ullas Karanth (tiger ecology), Aparajita Datta (hornbill conservation), and Dr. Ajith Kumar (primates) have dedicated their lives to understanding and saving species.

Artists, too, wield brushes, cameras, and words as weapons of awareness. Films like The Elephant Whisperers remind us that storytelling can shift global consciousness. The struggle for wildlife is not limited to fieldwork; it is also fought in classrooms, courtrooms, and cinema halls.

Resistance as a Song of Hope

Each success story, whether it is the rebound of the gharial in Chambal, the return of olive ridley turtles to Odisha’s beaches, or the protection of barasingha in Kanha, is not an accident. It is the outcome of stubborn resistance, often by people with little power or wealth but immense will.

Conservation is a song of hope sung against a chorus of threats. It tells us that extinction is not inevitable. That with care, courage, and imagination, species on the brink can return. That wildness, though fragile, can be reborn.

Section III — The Moral Imperative: Why Saving Wildlife is Saving Ourselves

Extinction is often spoken of as though it concerns “them,” the tiger in a distant jungle, the dolphin in a river we may never see, the frog croaking in a monsoon pond. But the truth is sharper: extinction is about “us.” Every vanished species is a thread pulled from the fabric of life, weakening the very cloth that shelters humanity. To save wildlife is not charity. It is survival.

The Web That Binds: Ecology as Mutual Existence

The earth does not function in silos. A vulture circling above carrion, a bee buzzing through mustard flowers, a fish darting through mangroves, each is a part of an intricate system that sustains human life.

Pollination: Nearly 75% of crops depend on pollinators like bees, bats, and butterflies. Their decline directly threatens food security.
Pest Control: Owls devour rats that would otherwise ravage fields. Frogs consume mosquitoes, curbing diseases like malaria and dengue.
Sanitation: Vultures dispose of carcasses swiftly, preventing the spread of anthrax and rabies. Their near-extinction in the 1990s due to diclofenac poisoning caused feral dog populations to surge, resulting in a spike in rabies deaths in humans.

To let a species vanish is to invite imbalance. When ecosystems collapse, it is humans who face famine, disease, and disaster.

Climate Allies: Wildlife as Natural Guardians

Forests absorb carbon, rivers filter pollutants, and mangroves shield coasts from cyclones. Wildlife sustains these ecosystems. Elephants, for example, disperse seeds over vast distances, ensuring forest regeneration. Whales sequester carbon in the deep oceans. Without these natural allies, climate change will accelerate beyond control.

The Sundarbans mangroves, home to the Bengal tiger, saved millions during Cyclone Amphan by absorbing storm surges. Protecting the tiger, therefore, is not only about charisma but about preserving the mangrove’s shield against rising seas.

Cultural and Spiritual Anchors

Across India, animals are not just biological entities; they are woven into myths, rituals, and identities. The sarus crane is a symbol of marital fidelity, the elephant embodies wisdom as Ganesha, and the peacock adorns the national emblem. Losing these species would be a cultural amputation, severing stories and symbols that bind communities.

Moreover, indigenous knowledge systems from the Bishnoi reverence for blackbucks to the Apatani harmony with fish and paddy are proof that human culture thrives when it reveres, not exploits, the wild.

Economic Dimensions: Wildlife as Wealth

Tourism, livelihoods, and even industries are tied to biodiversity. Tiger reserves generate employment for guides, drivers, and artisans. Healthy forests provide timber, honey, and medicinal plants. Rivers rich in fish sustain communities.

The collapse of a species often translates to economic ruin. For instance, the near-extinction of vultures costs India billions in healthcare expenses due to rabies outbreaks triggered by feral dogs. Biodiversity loss is thus not an abstract tragedy but a tangible economic threat.

Ethical Responsibility: Do We Have the Right to Erase?

Perhaps the deepest question is moral. Every species carries millions of years of evolution, a unique story of survival written into its DNA. Do humans, in a few centuries of industrial ambition, have the right to erase these stories?

The argument for survival is pragmatic, but the argument for dignity is profound. Animals exist not for us but with us. Their right to live is independent of their utility to humans. To honour that right is to affirm our own humanity.

The Psychology of Silence: Extinction as Emotional Loss

Studies reveal that humans suffer from “extinction of experience” when people grow up without hearing the songs of birds, without seeing fireflies at night, without smelling wildflowers; they lose empathy for nature. Urban children who never encounter frogs in monsoon or butterflies in gardens are less likely to care about conservation as adults.

Extinction, therefore, hollows not only ecosystems but also imagination. It narrows the human soul. The wild is not just external; it is internal. To lose it is to lose part of ourselves.

Urgency Beyond Borders

India is one of 17 “megadiverse” countries, home to lions, elephants, tigers, snow leopards, gharials, and hundreds of endemic species. Its choices will ripple globally. If India cannot protect its biodiversity, the global climate fight, food security, and cultural heritage will suffer.

This urgency must be understood as immediate. Extinction is not a future possibility; it is happening now. The great Indian bustard is down to fewer than 200 individuals. The gharial, once abundant in rivers, survives in isolated pockets. Amphibians vanish silently, uncounted and unmoored. We stand not at the edge but in the middle of a crisis.

Saving Wildlife is Saving Tomorrow

To protect the wild is to invest in our children’s inheritance. It is to ensure that they inherit a planet where rivers still sing with dolphins, skies still echo with cranes, and forests still resound with tigers. It is to leave them not just oxygen and water, but wonder.

Conservation is not a luxury. It is the most urgent form of self-preservation. The moral imperative is clear: when we save wildlife, we save the possibility of a liveable, meaningful tomorrow.

Section IV — A Roadmap for the Future: From Despair to Action

To understand extinction is to feel grief. To fight extinction is to carry hope. Between grief and hope lies responsibility, the human duty to act. If we are, as some philosophers say, the “storytelling species,” then the story we must now tell is one of redemption: how humanity turned from destroyer to protector, from exploiter to guardian. This roadmap is not abstract; it is urgent, practical, and deeply moral.

Policy With Teeth, Not Just Paper

India has laws the Wildlife Protection Act, the Forest Rights Act, and the Biological Diversity Act. Yet, gaps in enforcement dilute their power. Stronger monitoring, faster judicial processes, and harsher penalties for wildlife crimes are essential. But policy must also be imaginative:

Ecological Corridors: Highways and railways must build underpasses and overpasses for safe animal crossings. The recent success of wildlife overpasses in Maharashtra shows this can work.
Habitat Prioritization: Grasslands must be reclassified as ecosystems, not “wastelands.” Wetlands must be mapped and legally protected. Mangroves must be shielded from urban sprawl.
Sustainable Development Audits: Every infrastructure project must pass not just an environmental clearance but a biodiversity clearance, assessing its impact on species survival.

Policy must recognize that wildlife protection is not an obstacle to development but the foundation of sustainable growth.

Empowering Local Communities

Conservation cannot be imposed from Delhi or state capitals; it must root itself in villages and towns that share space with wildlife. People must feel that protecting animals enriches, not endangers, their lives.

Compensation Schemes: Farmers who lose crops to elephants or cattle to leopards must be compensated quickly and fairly. Delay breeds resentment; justice builds cooperation.
Community Forest Rights: Empowering tribal and forest-dwelling communities to manage their lands creates guardianship. Studies show forests under community stewardship often thrive better than those under bureaucratic control.
Livelihood Alternatives: Eco-tourism, handicrafts, and sustainable harvesting can offer income linked directly to conservation. When wildlife flourishes, communities prosper.

When people see themselves not as victims of conservation but as its partners, harmony emerges.

Education as Transformation

Every extinction is also an educational failure. Children who grow up without learning the value of frogs, trees, or bees will not fight for them as adults. Conservation must seep into classrooms, curricula, and culture.

Nature Curriculum: Schools must teach biodiversity not as a dull chapter but through field trips, storytelling, and outdoor classrooms.
Urban Engagement: Cities must build butterfly gardens, birding parks, and green rooftops, bringing wildness closer to urban lives.
Media and Arts: Films, music, and literature must carry the urgency of extinction into popular imagination. Just as cinema shaped social reforms in India, it can ignite conservation.

The next generation must inherit not just facts but a visceral connection with the living world.

Science and Innovation: Beyond Sympathy to Strategy

Compassion alone cannot reverse extinction; it must be married to science. From genetic studies that map population diversity to AI-driven anti-poaching patrols, innovation is reshaping conservation.

DNA Databanks: Tracking illegal wildlife trade through genetic fingerprints strengthens enforcement.
Restoration Science: Reforestation projects must plant native species, not monocultures of eucalyptus or acacia.
Assisted Breeding: Critically endangered species like the great Indian bustard may need controlled breeding programs to ensure survival.

Innovation must be ethical, inclusive, and guided by long-term sustainability, not quick fixes.

A Global Responsibility

India cannot fight extinction alone. Migratory birds depend on multiple nations. Climate change reshapes habitats across borders. Poaching networks operate transnationally.

International Cooperation: Strengthening treaties like CITES and CBD is vital. India must lead as a voice for the Global South, linking biodiversity protection with climate justice.
Funding Mechanisms: Wealthy nations must contribute more to conservation in biodiversity hotspots like India, where resources are stretched thin but the stakes are immense.
Knowledge Exchange: Shared learning from African anti-poaching models to Amazonian community conservation can accelerate India’s efforts.

Saving wildlife is not India’s burden alone; it is humanity’s collective test.

The Citizen’s Role: From Indifference to Action

Extinction cannot be fought only in forests and reserves. It must be fought in living rooms, markets, and the choices we make daily.

Responsible Consumption: Refusing ivory trinkets, exotic pets, or unsustainable wood reduces demand that fuels poaching.
Citizen Science: Ordinary people can monitor birds, butterflies, and urban wildlife, feeding crucial data into conservation research.
Political Voice: Citizens can pressure leaders to prioritize biodiversity, protest destructive projects, and vote for ecological responsibility.

The fight is not only for rangers in forests but for every citizen who chooses empathy over apathy.

Reimagining Development: A Planet-Friendly Future

At its heart, extinction is not a wildlife crisis but a human development crisis. The model of endless growth, powered by extraction and expansion, collides with the limits of nature. India, poised between aspiration and tradition, must reimagine development.

Renewable energy must avoid destroying critical habitats.
Urban planning must weave in biodiversity corridors.
Agricultural policies must integrate agroecology, reducing pesticide-driven collapse of pollinators.

True development is not highways that slice through forests or industries that poison rivers. True development is a balance where economy and ecology sustain one another.

A Call to Conscience

The roadmap is not merely technical; it is spiritual. It asks humanity to look into the eyes of a tiger, the wings of a butterfly, the songs of a whale, and see not an “other” but a kin. It asks us to remember that the earth is not inherited from ancestors but borrowed from children.

If we can muster the courage, imagination, and solidarity, we can still turn the tide. Extinction is not inevitable; it is a choice. And so is survival.

Conclusion: Toward a History of Hope

Let the 21st century not be remembered as the Age of Extinction but as the Age of Awakening when humanity, standing at the cliff’s edge, chose to step back and heal. Let India, with its rivers, forests, mountains, and deserts, become a beacon of coexistence, proving that even amid billions of people, the wild can thrive.

History will not forgive us if we fail. But history will celebrate us if we succeed, if we leave behind a world still echoing with roars, songs, and flights. A world alive.

. . .

References:

WWF India — Staggering 73% decline in wildlife populations in just 50 Years: WWF’s Living Planet Report warns of a system in peril https://www.wwfindia.org
Living Planet Report 2024 — Key Findings by WWF: “Nature is Disappearing: The Average Size of Wildlife Populations Has Fallen by a Staggering 73%” https://livingplanet.panda.org
Government of India, Rajya Sabha PDF: Critically endangered species in India (Q.N. 1796, Dec 2022) https://sansad.in
Press Information Bureau (PIB), India — Efforts for conservation of threatened species (2024) https://www.pib.gov.in
Hindustan Times — 73 species critically endangered in India, says Centre in Rajya Sabha (26 Dec 2022) https://www.hindustimes.com

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