India will organise the first ever international summit on big cats this year, Union Minister of Finance, Nirmala Sitharaman announced while tabling the Union Budget 2026 in Parliament on February 1, 2026.
“This year the International Big Cat Alliance will organise the first-ever Big Cat summit, where Heads of States and ministers from 95 range countries will deliberate on collective conservation strategies,” said Sitharaman during the course of her speech.
In a social media post late last year, the IBCA had posted: “We are thrilled to share that India will host the International Conference on hashtag#SnowLeopard and the hashtag#GlobalBigCatsSummit in New Delhi in 2026, a landmark international conference designed to deepen cooperation, share best practices, and elevate policies for protecting big cats and their habitats around the world.”
The IBCA was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on April 9, 2023. It officially came into force from January 23, 2025. It is now a full-fledged treaty-based inter-governmental international organisation and international legal entity.
What are Big Cats?
‘Big Cat’ is a term that is used in informal speech to apply to any large species of the family Felidae. Usually, it applies to the members of the genus Panthera. These include:
1. Tiger (Panthera tigris)
2. Lion (Panthera leo)
3. Jaguar (Panthera onca)
4. Leopard (Panthera pardus)
5. Snow Leopard (Panthera uncia)
All these cats can usually make vocalisations known as ‘roars’. The lion has the loudest roar, which can be heard 8-10 kilometres away. The snow leopard, at one time, was not included in this group. It was classified as Uncia uncia. Later, it was re-classified as part of Panthera.
Two other cats — Puma (Puma concolor) and Cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) — are not part of Panthera. But they are usually included in most listings of ‘big cats’.
The Indian subcontinent has been historically home to the Bengal tiger, Asiatic lion, Indian leopard, Indian/Asiatic cheetah as well as Snow leopard. The cheetah was declared extinct in 1952. In 2022, the Government of India embarked on an ambitious programme to introduce African cheetahs to the Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh.
“The IBCA is an excellent platform for sharing of information about big cats between trans boundary range states like the Amur tiger between China, Russia and the Koreas, the snow leopard in Inner Asia and the tiger between South and Southeast Asia. The Alliance has been formed keeping in view big cats as these are flagship or umbrella or keystone species whose conservation includes that of smaller species including mesopredators like smaller cats. For instance, the conservation of tigers in Ranthambore includes that of Jungle Cats and Caracals in Ranthambore while the conservation of snow leopards in the trans Himalayas includes the conservation of the Pallas Cat. That said, the conservation of smaller cats is also important, and I hope someday we can have an independent alliance dealing exclusively with them,” conservation ecologist Sumit Dookia told Down To Earth (DTE).