SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 9 September 2024, Shift 1 · General Awareness · Question 1 of 100

Text as printed on a candidate's response sheet for this shift; answer per SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet. Solution last reviewed 6 September 2026.

Where this paper and its answers come from

SSC does not publish CGL question papers or a public answer key. The questions and options here are reproduced as printed on a candidate's own response sheet for this shift — the Commission's text, unchanged. Each answer is SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet; SSC allowed challenges to it and never publishes a final key. The solutions are written by UnlockIAS.

In which year was Project Tiger launched in India?

(a)1973
(b)1970
(c)1972
(d)1985

Answer

Why

Correct — A. Project Tiger was launched in 1973 as a centrally sponsored scheme to protect the tiger and the habitat it needs.

It began with nine tiger reserves, Jim Corbett in Uttarakhand among them. The near-miss planted in the list is 1972 — the year of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, the law that made the project possible. The two sit a year apart, and candidates routinely swap them.

Why the others are wrong

(b)
1970 — 1970 predates the scheme. Nothing of this name existed then, and the conservation landmark students half-remember from the early 1970s is the 1972 Act, not a 1970 project.
(c)
1972 — 1972 is the Wildlife (Protection) Act, which created national parks, sanctuaries and the schedules of protected species. The project built on that Act came the following year.
(d)
1985 — 1985 is far too late. Reserves notified under Project Tiger had been running for more than a decade by then, so no launch belongs to the mid-1980s.

Concept

Project Tiger is a centrally sponsored scheme: the Union environment ministry funds and coordinates it, while the states manage the reserves on the ground.

Its statutory backbone came from elsewhere. The Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972 gave India its protected areas and its ban on hunting scheduled species.

The 2006 amendment to that Act gave statutory status to the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), which administers the project and the reserve network today.

SSC asks the launch year far more often than the reserve count — and the count keeps changing as new reserves are notified, so any number you memorised for it is dated. The year is not.

Key facts

Project Tiger was launched in 1973 with nine tiger reserves.
The Wildlife (Protection) Act was passed in 1972, a year before the project.
Jim Corbett National Park in Uttarakhand was among the first reserves under the scheme.
The National Tiger Conservation Authority administers Project Tiger today.

Study next

Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972 — schedules and protected-area categoriesNational Tiger Conservation Authority and the four-yearly tiger estimationProject Elephant and other species-specific central schemes

Common traps

Marking 1972 because that is the year of the Wildlife (Protection) Act.
Confusing the launch year with the year the NTCA was given statutory status.

The stem names the scheme and asks for the year, and the decoys are neighbouring years rather than distant ones — 1972 is in the list because it is the year of the Wildlife (Protection) Act.

Hold the scheme by three handles, since any of them can be the asked slot: the launch year, the authority that runs it (NTCA), and the nine reserves it began with.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.