OUR WORK

We collaborate with state governments to monitor the illegal wildlife trade and provide them with hands-on training and support to combat poaching and the illegal wildlife trade.

We conduct Wildlife Law Enforcement Workshops for enforcement agencies. More than 8,000 forest, police and customs officers have received training in more than 200 workshops which have been held in 17 states across India. We have also given specialist presentations to the National Police Academy, the Indian Institute of Criminology, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), Customs and Excise, the Wildlife Institute of India, tiger reserve authorities, and enforcement training centres.

Our Wildlife Crime Database is the most comprehensive in India, with details of over 20,000 wildlife cases and 16,000 alleged wildlife criminals. It is constantly analysed and updated with inputs from a number of sources including our country network of investigators. The information plays a critical role in the development of new strategies to protect Indian wildlife.

We have pioneered investigations into the trade in tiger parts and other endangered species valued in the illegal wildlife trade, and exposed widespread tiger poaching and its links to the use of tiger parts in traditional Chinese medicine. The death of a wild tiger no longer goes ignored and people now know how and why tigers are killed.

We were the first organisation to expose the workings of the shahtoosh trade and its links with the trade in tiger parts. We uncovered this trade in the mid-1990s, while investigating the smuggling of tiger bones, and produced a path-breaking report on the subject in 1997 - “Fashioned for Extinction: An Expose of the Shahtoosh Trade”.

Over the years, we have assisted in the arrests of hundreds of wildlife criminals and the seizures of huge amounts of illegal wildlife products, particularly tiger parts. In 2011 we provided information and assistance to enforcement agencies to register 39 wildlife cases, in which a total of 97 alleged wildlife criminals were arrested.

Our Legal Programme supports the prosecution of a number of important wildlife cases. These include poaching and trade cases that involve tiger and other endangered species. We also file petitions on important wildlife conservation issues, including encroachments in protected areas. On the policy front, WPSI provides inputs to the central and state governments for the development of better policies governing forests and wildlife.

We support Conservation Projects for species as varied as the tiger, elephant and sea turtle in the States of Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Utarakhand and West Bengal and work with other critical issues such as human-animal conflict involving tigers, leopard and elephants.

Our Community Support projects include a program on the fringes of Sundarbans Tiger Reserve, where we have a tiger conservation centre, 51 self-help groups with a micro credit scheme and a kindergarten school. Here and in other areas we also work on the critical issue of human-animal conflict.

We constantly liaise with policy makers and international conservation agencies, particularly on issues concerning poaching and the illegal wildlife trade. WPSI has also been in the forefront of media campaigns to highlight the importance of wildlife protection.

In 2005 and 2006, WPSI and the UK- based Environmental Protection Agency (EIA) carried out a joint investigation into the tiger and leopard skin trade in the Tibet Autonomous Region and other provinces in China. Our findings revealed a hitherto unknown scale of trade in Asian big cat skins that were being traded and worn as status symbols in Tibet. Our investigations were compiled in a report – “Skinning the Cat: Crime and Politics of the Big Cat Skin Trade”, published in 2006. The results of the investigation and condemnation of the trade by the Dalai Lama have since sparked a massive movement by Tibetans to end the use of wild animal skins