Protected areas constitute only approximately 4% of the land area of India. Many ecologically rich and sensitive regions are outside this network, thus providing a potential for enlarging the protected area network through the incorporation of additional land into protected areas. Although such inclusions are possible with Government-owned land, incorporating privately-owned land can be expensive and time-consuming. Thus, immediate steps are required to maintain and enhance biodiversity in areas identified as corridors on both state-owned forests and privately-owned land.

In India, Protected Areas (PA) constitute only about 4% of the land area and these PAs occur as small isolated management units within a matrix of reserve forest, forest plantations and production landscapes. Management efforts to date have been PA centric and only in the past few years, has the focus changed to managing our remaining wildlife and wild habitats as landscape units.

Critical wildlife corridors often pass through land under different types of ownership. This includes government-owned forests, individual landowners and company-owned estates. Restoring/maintaining connectivity in areas under the control of the Forest Department is easily achieved. However, doing so on privately owned areas needs alternatives especially when outright purchase is not an option. 

Fresh-water aquatic ecosystems, especially rivers are the most threatened biome globally. Rivers and their biodiversity and ecosystem services are relatively under-valued and neglected, exposed to pollution, habitat degradation and over-exploitation. The few remaining free-flowing rivers and streams are under serious threat of transformations such as upstream abstraction to meet human demands especially for irrigation and their flow regimes are altered by hydro-power dams and reservoir operations.