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Biodiversity conservation: global efforts
India is both a route for the global wildlife trade and a party to the agreements meant to close it. September 2026 brought two trafficking cases inside a week, five baby orangutans, a species with no wild range here, abandoned in Odisha, and a revenue intelligence haul of pangolin scales, live star tortoises and tokay geckos. Both run on the same machinery.
UPSC has asked
- Prelims 2023: which animal makes a tool from a stick
- Prelims 2017: what Schedule I protection means for a tortoise
- Prelims 2015: the IUCN and CITES
- Prelims 2013: species found naturally in India, including the star tortoise
What the international system decides
- The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) binds its parties to control trade across their borders, and each country then needs a law of its own to act inside them.
- The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List grades how close a species is to extinction, from Least Concern to Extinct, and carries no legal force of its own.
- A species can be Least Concern and still be protected strictly, because a trade listing answers how heavily an animal is traded rather than how rare it is.
What Indian law decides
- The Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972 places species in schedules, and Schedule I gives the highest protection, as it does to the leopard and to every species in the seizures below.
- Schedule IV, added in 2022, brought exotic species into the Act, which is how an animal with no Indian range is covered at all.
Who works the cases
- The Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WCCB) is a statutory body, and it is the agency that takes up a trafficking investigation.
- The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) works under the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs, and meets wildlife cases at the customs frontier, alongside the Bureau.
The species in the seizures
Pangolin
- Schedule I
- CITES Appendix I since 2016
- Indian Manis crassicaudata, Endangered, across much of India
- Chinese Manis pentadactyla, Critically Endangered, in the Northeast
- Scales for traditional medicine
Indian star tortoise
- Schedule I
- CITES Appendix I since 2019
- Geochelone elegans, Vulnerable
- Dry scrub and grassland of peninsular and northwestern India, and Sri Lanka
- Exotic pet trade
Tokay gecko
- Schedule I
- CITES Appendix II since 2019
- Gekko gecko, Least Concern globally
- Dried for traditional medicine, some pet demand
Asia's only great apes
Bornean orangutan
- Pongo pygmaeus, the lowland and hill rainforests of Borneo
- Critically Endangered
Sumatran orangutan
- Pongo abelii, the rainforests of northern Sumatra
- Critically Endangered
Tapanuli orangutan
- Pongo tapanuliensis, the Batang Toru forest of North Sumatra
- Critically Endangered
- Orangutans live wild only on Borneo and Sumatra, and are the only great apes found in Asia.
- All three species are in CITES Appendix I.
What has happened
9 Sep 2026
The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence announced seizures of two leopard pelts, 180 live Indian star tortoises, 12 live tokay geckos, about 24 kg of pangolin scales and 500 grams of tiger bones.
8 Sep 2026
Five baby orangutans were found abandoned in Balasore district, Odisha, and the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau opened a trafficking investigation.
- The five were given a new home in Odisha while the route by which they reached the country is traced.
- No orangutan has a wild range in India, so the animals can only have been brought in.
The Hindu, 8 Sep 2026: Five young orangutans rescued from Odisha's Balasore district (opens in a new tab) · The Indian Express, 9 Sep 2026: As 5 orangutans find new home in Odisha, a probe into how they landed there (opens in a new tab)