The Wildlife Institute of India (WII) is an internationally acclaimed autonomous institution established in 1982 under the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), Government of India. It was registered as a society under the Societies Registration Act, 1860, which granted it operational autonomy while ensuring it remained funded and supervised by the MoEFCC. The institute was set up in Dehradun, Uttarakhand, to address a chronic shortage of scientifically trained wildlife managers that became apparent following the implementation of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, and the launch of Project Tiger in 1973. The problem it solved was the lack of an agency to combine holistic forest management with biodiversity conservation and to provide a scientific basis for statutory conservation programs.
WII's mechanism works through three interlocking functions: training, research, and advisory support. Its mandate is to generate quality knowledge in wildlife science and complement national conservation efforts. Key functions include offering academic courses like the M.Sc. in Wildlife Science, conducting research across diverse biogeographic zones of India on themes like species recovery and conservation genetics, and providing advisory services to the government. A defining contribution is its role as the technical executor of the All India Tiger Estimation (AITE), the quadrennial national tiger census, in partnership with the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA). WII also maintains the National Wildlife Database and a wildlife forensic and genetics laboratory, the reports from which have credibility in a court of law.
The institute connects directly to the MoEFCC and the NTCA. In 2020, the Department of Expenditure, Ministry of Finance, recommended that the MoEFCC "disengage" from WII and reduce its funding, proposing to turn it into a deemed university. This proposal, which would have significantly changed its funding and operational model, was opposed by the WII Director, who argued that the institute's specialized scope and inability to generate adequate revenue made continued support from the MoEFCC vital. The institute's status as an autonomous body under the MoEFCC, therefore, has been recently challenged but its core functions and structure have largely stayed the same.