India is celebrating the golden jubilee of Project Tiger. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on April 9 released the fifth cycle of a census that shows India’s tiger population in the wild increased last year to 3,167, a 6.7 percent increase from 2018.

Project Tiger was launched in the Jim Corbett National Park in 1973 and it has made remarkable progress since then. Starting from less than 1,800 tigers in the 1970s, the number grew steadily to 2,967 in the 2018 census. The number of tiger reserves in the country has increased from 9 to 53 over the last 5 decades, covering 2.5% of India’s land area.