Protected areas: national parks, sanctuaries and reserves

India's protected-area network is created mainly under the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972. The Act provides for national parks, wildlife sanctuaries, conservation reserves and community reserves, each with a different level of restriction. A national park is the strictest category: grazing, settlement and most extraction are barred, and entry is regulated. A sanctuary allows some regulated human activity and existing rights to continue, which is why sanctuaries can contain roads, villages or temples.

Recent official summaries put the network at more than 100 national parks and more than 570 wildlife sanctuaries, covering roughly 5 per cent of India's land area, together with conservation and community reserves. Exact totals change as new areas are notified, so civil studies answers should date any figure and say what it counts. Biosphere reserves are a separate, larger concept: there are 18 notified biosphere reserves in India, several of which are part of UNESCO's World Network of Biosphere Reserves, and they combine a strictly protected core with buffer and transition zones where sustainable use is allowed.

Protection on paper is not the same as protection in practice. Reserves face pressure from roads, mining, grazing, invasive species, poaching and tourism, and from people who lived in or near forests long before a boundary was drawn. Corridors between protected areas matter because isolated populations lose genetic diversity and are more vulnerable to a single disease, fire or drought.

The strongest conservation systems therefore combine strict cores, managed buffers, corridors and local consent. A reserve that local people experience only as a restriction is harder to defend than one that also brings them employment, secure rights and a share of tourism income. Without that link, boundaries are drawn on maps but not defended in villages, and poaching or encroachment simply moves to the next unguarded patch. Training and equipping frontline forest staff is therefore part of conservation, not an administrative afterthought.