"Heavy poaching, the illegal hunting of tigers, pushed numbers down." Here "poaching" means

In 1973, the Government of India launched Project Tiger, one of the most ambitious wildlife conservation projects the country had ever attempted. Its aim was to protect the tiger and, with it, the forests and the many other living things that share its home.

The project began with nine tiger reserves covering about 18,000 square kilometres. Fifty years later, there were fifty-three reserves covering nearly 76,000 square kilometres, about 2.3 per cent of India's land. Today India is home to almost three-quarters of the world's wild tigers.

The journey was not smooth. The first phase, in the 1970s, brought a law to protect wildlife and set aside protected areas. But in the 1980s heavy poaching, the illegal hunting of tigers, pushed numbers down again.

So in 2005 a second phase began, with a different approach. Instead of protecting only single reserves, it looked after whole landscapes, involved local communities, enforced the law strictly, and used modern technology such as camera traps to count and watch tigers scientifically. This approach helped the tiger population to grow again, and it also helped identify new reserves and the corridors that let tigers move safely between them.