100 years ago, India was home to 40,000 tigers. Today, the number hovers somewhere between 2,000 and 3,700.

This drastic decrease gains all the more import because this meager number represents nearly half of the world’s tiger population.

Conservationalists have targeted India as a place in need of wildlife reform because of the decades of rampant poaching and smuggling of tiger and leopard skins over the Chinese border. Poaching is the number one cause of the shrinkage in the population of these jungle cats.

But recently officials at India’s Ministry of Environments and Forests have named a number of ways in which they plan on cracking down on poachers, highlighting the growing trend of environmental and wildlife awareness in the nation.

The first plan is to employ the existing military in enforcing anti-poaching laws. The Ministry proposes to invest soldiers with the power to arrest poachers, and even open fire if they evade arrest. Much of the army is already positioned at border locations where a great deal of poaching occurs, but they will now have the ability to stop these acts when found. Kalpana Palkiwala, a spokeswoman for the Ministry of the Environment and Forests, said this will give every soldier “parity with chief wildlife wardens.”

The next step will come with the institution of a Wildlife Crime Control Bureau. The government has been discussing the creation of such an agency for over a year, and announced on 19 June that these plans would indeed come to fruition. A. Raja, Minister of Environments and Forests, proclaimed that the Bureau would be established “to protect wild animals and bring an end to the smuggling of animal skins and body parts.”

The new Wildlife Bureau’s main task will be to investigate wildlife crimes and take action, much like, for example, the Narcotics Control Bureau manages crimes related to narcotics. Officials from police, army, forestry and customs forces will be incorporated, both as a task force and also to provide information. State governments will be required to report wildlife crimes in their states so that the centralised Bureau can analyze trends.

These amendments to the Wildlife Protection Act will be made during the monsoon session of parliament, with plans to implement them afterwards.

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