Environment › Biodiversity governance
Human wildlife conflict and wildlife crime
Where wild animals and people meet, and where the law meets those who trade in wildlife: conflict and compensation, roads and railways through habitat, poaching, seizures and the smuggling of exotic animals. Prelims has asked which of a set of animals, the star tortoise among them, are found naturally in India.
6 Aug 2026 · Prelims and Mains
Enclosure for lions that attack people
Lions living among people sometimes attack them, and a species found nowhere else offers no easy answer to that. Gujarat's answer is to take the animal out of the landscape rather than out of the population.
- It is creating a 100 ha enclosure for lions that have attacked people.
8 Sep 2026 · Prelims and Mains
Orangutans
Five baby orangutans were found abandoned in Balasore district, Odisha, of an animal that is not merely rare in India but has no wild range here at all, and that is one of the 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.
- The five can therefore only have been brought into the country, which is why the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WCCB), the statutory body that takes up a trafficking investigation, opened one.
- They were given a new home in Odisha while the route by which they arrived is traced.
- All three orangutan species are in CITES Appendix I.
UPSC has asked
- Prelims 2023: which animal makes a tool from a stick
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)
9 Sep 2026 · Prelims and Mains
Pangolin, Indian star tortoise and tokay gecko
The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence announced a haul of three heavily trafficked species, each wanted for a different reason: scales for medicine, a tortoise for a pet shop, a gecko dried for a remedy.
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
- The seizures were 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.
- 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.
UPSC has asked
- Prelims 2013: species found naturally in India, including the star tortoise
Also filed elsewhere
- Nagarjunasagar-Srisailam Tiger Reserve · on Protected areas, tiger reserves and eco sensitive zones
India's largest tiger reserve lost three tigers in July, and one of them was poached.
- Project Elephant · on Elephants and other land mammals
Project Elephant marked World Elephant Day with two announcements, and neither was about how many elephants there are.