Wildlife Sanctuaries in India: The Ones UPSC Actually Asked About

There are 573 wildlife sanctuaries in India, according to the Wildlife Institute of India data published by PIB, plus 106 national parks and a few hundred conservation and community reserves. Nobody preparing for UPSC should try to memorise that list. Prelims does not test it evenly.

In Tootler's bank of transcribed Prelims papers, 20 questions from 14 different years between 2007 and 2026 ask about specific national parks, sanctuaries, tiger reserves and wetlands. Read together, they show a clear pattern: UPSC keeps returning to tiger reserves, Ramsar wetlands, areas that have been renamed, and parks with one unusual feature. This guide covers 26 of the protected areas those questions named, grouped that way, with each state and status checked against the official lists you can study from.

If you are still unsure what separates a sanctuary from a national park in law, read national park vs wildlife sanctuary first. This page is about places.

This guide is part of Tootler's series on environment and ecology for UPSC, which maps all 284 environment questions in Prelims by topic.

Tiger reserves UPSC has named

India has 58 tiger reserves on the National Tiger Conservation Authority's list. A tiger reserve usually overlaps one or more national parks or sanctuaries, which is why the same place can appear under two names in different years.

What a tiger reserve is in law

A tiger reserve is not a third kind of national park. Under Section 38V of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, the state government notifies one on the recommendation of the National Tiger Conservation Authority, and it has two parts. The core or critical tiger habitat is the area of national parks and sanctuaries that, on scientific and objective criteria, must be kept inviolate for tigers, without affecting the rights of Scheduled Tribes and other forest dwellers. The buffer around it needs a lesser degree of protection and is meant to promote co-existence between wildlife and people, with its limits set in consultation with the gram sabha.

That structure is why a 2020 question could ask which reserve has the largest area under critical tiger habitat: the core is a defined, notified area, separate from the reserve's total size. Changing a reserve's boundary, or de-notifying it, needs both the Authority's recommendation and the National Board for Wildlife's approval (Section 38W), a stricter rule than the one for an ordinary sanctuary.

Two rows deserve a closer look. Pakke is a renaming trap: the reserve's own site explains that the area was renamed Pakhui Wildlife Sanctuary in 2001 and became Pakhui Tiger Reserve in 2002, so a question can use either name. UPSC used the older one:

Madhav shows how quickly a newly notified reserve reaches the paper. It is the last entry on NTCA's list, and UPSC asked about it in 2026 with statements on its tiger reserve status, a Ramsar site and its location:

Ramsar wetlands UPSC has named

Wetlands designated under the Ramsar Convention are the second large group. All ten below appear in the Ministry of Environment's official list of Ramsar sites, which counted 89 sites as of 30 January 2025.

The 2022 question is the clearest example of how wetlands are tested. It gives four wetlands with a state against each and asks how many pairs are right. Knowing the name of a wetland is not enough; the marks depend on knowing its state.

Wetland questions also mix in geography. In 2014, UPSC paired Harike, Keoladeo and Kolleru with river confluences, and in 2011 it described two rivers meeting near the Odisha coast and asked which protected area sits there. For these, learn each site's river or water source along with its state.

National parks known for one feature

A third group of questions describes a single feature and asks which park has it. Three of them come up often enough to learn properly.

Keibul Lamjao National Park, Manipur. Loktak Lake is covered in phumdi, a Manipuri word for floating mats of soil and vegetation, and India's UNESCO tentative-list submission notes that the largest area of phumdi in the lake lies within Keibul Lamjao. The park is home to the sangai, the Manipur brow-antlered deer. UPSC asked for the park with floating vegetation in 2015.

Desert National Park, Rajasthan. It lies in Jaisalmer and Barmer districts and holds a good population of the Great Indian Bustard, which the Rajasthan Forest Department's submission to UNESCO records. The 2020 question tested both the district count and the bustard.

Valley of Flowers National Park, Uttarakhand. It forms a World Heritage site together with Nanda Devi National Park, inscribed in 1988 and extended in 2005. UPSC used it in 2019 in a question about a park lying entirely in the temperate alpine zone.

The rest of this group are one-off descriptions: a park with a climate range from tropical to arctic (2015), rivers flowing through Corbett, Kaziranga and Silent Valley (2013), and the territory with the most national parks (2008). These are where reading the actual question matters more than recall of a list.

How to study protected areas for Prelims

The questions above suggest a method that takes far less time than memorising every sanctuary.

1. Start from the two official lists. Learn NTCA's tiger reserves and the Ministry of Environment's Ramsar sites with their states. Together they cover most of the questions in this guide.
2. Map them. Mark each reserve and wetland on a blank map of India, state by state. Location questions, the most common type here, become much easier once you can picture the map.
3. Note every renaming and overlap. Pakke and Pakhui, Anamalai and the Indira Gandhi sanctuary, or a national park that is also a Ramsar site: these are exactly what pairs questions exploit.
4. Track new notifications in your exam year. Madhav, the newest reserve on NTCA's list, was asked in 2026. Check both lists a few months before Prelims.

Revise this map at widening intervals instead of rereading it the night before. A place you can locate from memory a month later is one you will get right in the exam.

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