Few things are as revealing as the compliments we pay by accident. When The Economist published its feature on India’s wildlife recovery, the headline was generous enough. It was the standfirst that gave the game away. India, it declared, is “still a relatively poor country” that has nonetheless managed “something as selfless as protecting other creatures.”
Read that again. The achievement is not what startled the editors. The achiever is. A nation of 1.4 billion people, they imply, should not be capable of conscience until it has first grown rich enough to deserve one.
Readers noticed immediately. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma observed that bringing rhino poaching down to zero is far easier than dismantling the “inherent racist mentality” of the relics of the colonial empire, adding that in Assam, “we never say never.” Journalist Rohit Karir asked whether The Economist’s writers receive special training in condescension, and a special degree in ignorance of India’s ancient animal protection traditions.
A tradition older than the magazine
The ignorance is the real story. The idea that Indians discovered conservation only recently, and only when Western-style prosperity arrived, collapses under the weight of history. Ashoka’s edicts (ironically the name of The Economist’s writer too) in the third century BCE regulated the killing of animals and protected species.
The Bishnoi community of Rajasthan gave their lives in 1730 to protect Khejri trees. Sacred groves, ahimsa and the worship of tiger, elephant, serpent and eagle run through Indian civilisation. Protecting other creatures is not an exotic, newly acquired selflessness. It is old cultural inheritance.
The modern record is just as deep. Project Hangul for the Kashmir red stag began around 1970. Project Tiger launched on 1 April 1973. The Crocodile Conservation Project followed in 1975, covering the saltwater crocodile, mugger and gharial. Project Manipur Thamin for the brow-antlered sangai deer began in 1977, the Gangetic dolphin project in 1986, and Project Elephant in 1992. These were not luxuries bought by a rich country. They were commitments made by a young republic that was, by any measure, far poorer than it is today.
Who actually destroyed the tiger?
There is a bitter irony here that The Economist’s editors might have noticed had they looked at their own country’s history. As traveller and entrepreneur Saran Shanmugam pointed out, colonial-era hunting devastated India’s tigers. An estimated 1,579 were reportedly killed in 1878 alone. King George V shot 39 in eleven days in 1911, and the Prince of Wales bagged seven in four days in 1922. By 1972, India’s tiger population had fallen to 1,827.
Wealth, power and royalty, as Shanmugam put it, do not automatically confer class or respect for wildlife. The empire that nearly wiped out the tiger is the same tradition from which the magazine’s patronising wonder at its revival descends. India then took conservation into its own hands.
The numbers speak for themselves
Since 2014, India’s tiger population has risen from 2,226 to 3,682, an increase of 65 per cent. Asiatic lions have grown from 523 to 891, up 70 per cent. Leopards have risen from 7,910 to 13,874, up 75 per cent. Assam alone holds more than 4,000 greater one-horned rhinos, and India is home to the vast majority of the global population. Tiger reserves have grown from 50 to 58, and protected areas from 981 to 1,134.
This is not conservation by slogan. It is conservation backed by population counts, protected habitats, technology, enforcement and sustained political commitment, achieved in one of the most densely populated places on earth, where people and wildlife share the same landscapes. That is a far harder task than conserving in sparsely populated lands, and a world struggling with biodiversity loss should be studying how India does it.
“Relatively poor” and the missing context
On the economics, the framing is equally lazy. India is the world’s fifth-largest economy by nominal GDP, with a figure above US$4 trillion. On most projections it is poised to move up the rankings within a few years, and it is already among the fastest-growing major economies.
In purchasing power terms, it is already third. Per capita income remains modest, and no serious Indian commentator pretends otherwise. But the lesson of India’s conservation record is precisely that political will, community participation and institutional commitment matter more than a wealthy balance sheet. Those who treat conservation as something only rich nations can afford have it backwards. Many wealthy nations have presided over catastrophic biodiversity loss.
Condescension as a business model
None of this should surprise regular readers. A certain strain of Western commentary on India has long been less about reporting than about posture: India as a place of paradox, perpetual crisis or implausible exception, rarely just a country going about its business. The Economist has built a recognisable house style around that condescension, and it has become, for many Indian readers, its signature.
It is also worth asking why. Print circulation at The Economist has fallen well below its mid-2010s peak, and like every legacy publication it is fighting for attention in a digital market that rewards provocation. A standfirst that makes India’s decency sound astonishing is engineered to be shared, and outrage is a form of engagement. When subscription revenue is under pressure, clickbait with a Fleet Street accent is still clickbait.
India’s wildlife story deserves better. It is a story of ancient reverence and modern science, of village communities and forest guards, of a developing country that chose to keep its tigers when it could have chosen otherwise. The world should indeed be talking about it. It should just not need a colonial-era sense of astonishment to start the conversation.
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