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India to host first International Big Cat Alliance summit

The inaugural IBCA Summit in New Delhi is set to adopt a global 'Delhi Declaration' on big-cat conservation.

What happened

Background & context

The International Big Cat Alliance is an inter-governmental international organisation headquartered in India, created specifically to pool conservation effort across the world's largest wild felines. It was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in April 2023, announced around the 50th anniversary of Project Tiger — placing it deliberately in the lineage of India's flagship tiger-protection programme rather than as a standalone diplomatic initiative.

The IBCA's remit covers seven big cats: the Lion, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, Cheetah, Jaguar and Puma. Five of these — Lion (the Asiatic lion of Gir), Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard and the reintroduced Cheetah — occur in India; the remaining two, the Jaguar and the Puma, are species of the Americas and are not found in India or anywhere in Asia in the wild. By widening the lens from the tiger to all seven, India shifted from a single-species, national programme to a multi-species, multi-country conservation platform, while still anchoring the secretariat at home.

The Alliance is conceived as a multi-country, big-cat range platform open to range states (countries where these cats naturally occur), non-range interested countries, conservation partners, and scientific organisations. Its working idea is to share expertise, finance, technology and best practices on habitat protection, anti-poaching, prey-base management, human–wildlife conflict mitigation and species recovery — areas in which India has accumulated decades of programme experience through Project Tiger (1973), the later Project Elephant, the Project Lion conservation push for Gir's Asiatic lions, the Snow Leopard Population Assessment work in the Himalaya, and Project Cheetah, under which African cheetahs were translocated to Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh from 2022.

The 2026 summit is the Alliance's first full ministerial-and-Head-of-State gathering, converting a founding announcement into a working international body with a formal outcome document. The intended adoption of the Delhi Declaration gives the grouping its first negotiated, named instrument — the kind of founding text (analogous to how groupings like the International Solar Alliance produced framework documents) that anchors future commitments, financing and reporting.

India's own big-cat record is the substance behind the leadership claim, and the summit is best read against that backdrop. Project Tiger, launched in 1973, is the oldest of the species programmes; it created a network of tiger reserves now administered through the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), and India today holds the large majority of the world's wild tigers. The Asiatic lion survives as a single wild population in and around Gir in Gujarat, the focus of dedicated lion-conservation effort. The snow leopard, the high-altitude cat of the Himalaya and trans-Himalaya, is the subject of population-assessment exercises across the northern States and Union Territories. The leopard is the most widely distributed of India's cats, ranging from forests to the edges of cities. And the cheetah — declared extinct in India in 1952 — returned in 2022 under Project Cheetah, when African cheetahs were translocated to Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh, making India the first country to attempt an inter-continental reintroduction of a large carnivore. The IBCA is, in effect, the international scaling-up of this domestic portfolio.

Each of these big cats also carries a conservation status that examiners often pair with the species. The tiger and the Asiatic lion are listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List, the snow leopard as Vulnerable, and the leopard as Vulnerable, while the African cheetah is Vulnerable; all are protected under the highest schedule of India's Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972, and tiger, lion, leopard and snow leopard are also covered by international trade controls under CITES. These domestic and global instruments — the Wild Life (Protection) Act, the IUCN Red List, CITES, and the Convention on Migratory Species — are the regulatory backdrop into which a body like the IBCA plugs, complementing rather than replacing them by adding a dedicated, big-cat-specific cooperation platform.

For Prelims

What IBCA is NOT: It is not Project Tiger (a 1973 domestic, single-species centrally-sponsored scheme run through the National Tiger Conservation Authority). It is not Project Cheetah (the 2022 cheetah reintroduction at Kuno). It is not a single-species body — it spans seven cats. And it does not cover only cats found in India: two of its seven (Jaguar, Puma) are New-World species absent from Asia. It is an inter-governmental organisation with its secretariat in India, not a treaty under any pre-existing convention.
For UPSC: IBCA covers 7 big cats — remember that Puma and Jaguar are NOT found in India (no wild jaguars/pumas in Asia); India hosts the secretariat; launched 2023 on the 50th year of Project Tiger; first summit 1–2 June 2026 with the Delhi Declaration as its founding outcome. Keep it distinct from Project Tiger (1973) and Project Cheetah (2022).

The full set — match-the-pairs

Adjacent India-led international platforms worth remembering alongside the IBCA, all secretariat-in-India or India-initiated: the International Solar Alliance (ISA) on solar energy, the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI), the Global Biofuels Alliance, and the Big Cat-specific IBCA. The common confusion to avoid is treating the IBCA as a wing of Project Tiger or as a treaty under an existing convention — it is a free-standing inter-governmental organisation headquartered in India.

Why it matters

Big cats are apex predators and umbrella species: protecting their large home ranges automatically conserves the forests, grasslands, wetlands and mountain ecosystems beneath them, along with the prey base and the watershed services those landscapes provide. That is the logic behind the summit theme linking big cats to "humanity" and "ecosystem" — the cats are an instrument of landscape-scale conservation, not an end in themselves.

The problem the Alliance addresses is that big-cat populations are fragmented across many sovereign jurisdictions and face shared, cross-border pressures — habitat loss, prey depletion, poaching and illegal wildlife trade, and intensifying human–wildlife conflict — that no single country can solve alone. A pooled platform lets range states share finance, technology and proven recovery methods. For India, hosting the secretariat and the first summit is also a statement of conservation diplomacy and soft power: it converts a strong domestic record (the tiger recovery, the Asiatic lion's survival in Gir, the cheetah's reintroduction) into leadership of a global institution, in the way the International Solar Alliance and the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure positioned India on climate and resilience.

For Mains

Anchor
A question on India's conservation-diplomacy initiatives or on protecting flagship/umbrella species can be built directly around the IBCA — its 2023 founding, India-hosted secretariat, seven-species mandate and the 2026 Delhi Declaration.
Exemplification
Use the IBCA as a concrete example of how species-specific conservation (Project Tiger, Project Cheetah, Project Lion) scales up into a multilateral, ecosystem-level platform — illustrating the "umbrella species" principle in practice.
Substantiation
Supply hard facts in an answer on biodiversity governance: seven big cats, 95 range countries, India-hosted secretariat, founding around the 50th year of Project Tiger.
Position
Reflects the government's stated stance that conservation is a shared international responsibility and a vehicle for India's environmental leadership ("Save Big Cats, Save Humanity, Save Ecosystem").
Deploys into: conservation of biodiversity and umbrella/flagship species (GS3.14 — conservation, environmental pollution), and India-led international groupings and conservation diplomacy (GS2.18 — bilateral/regional/global groupings involving or affecting India's interests).

Source

Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change · 2026-05-06 · PRID 2258491 · PIB source ↗
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