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Marine Protected Areas India: What the Law Actually Protects

Marine Protected Areas India: What the Law Actually Protects

Author: Rohit Gupta

Published:

Rocky tropical coastline with shallow clear water and exposed reef rock in the Gulf of Mannar, India | Ocean Evoke India

Ask how many marine protected areas India has and you will get a different answer depending on where you look. A written reply given in the Lok Sabha in December 2023 put the figure at 130. A peer-reviewed paper puts it at 31. The National Maritime Foundation, writing in 2021, counted 25 on the mainland and 130 in the islands. The Wildlife Institute of India, working from data current to 1 April 2014, recorded 24 on the mainland and more than a hundred in the islands.

None of these sources is careless. They disagree because they are counting different things, at different times, under rules that most of them never state.

That makes the popular question, how many, less useful than it looks. A marine protected area is a legal status, not a measure of how much sea is safe. Two sites carrying the label can permit almost entirely different activities, and a country can add designations for years while the share of its sea under protection barely moves. This piece sets out what the designations are, what each one broadly allows, why the numbers disagree, and what the more honest measure of protection looks like.

What counts as a marine protected area in India

A marine protected area is a stretch of sea, shore, or both that has been set aside in law so that some or all of what lives there is protected. That is the plain meaning. The legal machinery behind it in India is the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, under which state governments establish protected areas in four categories: National Park, Wildlife Sanctuary, Conservation Reserve and Community Reserve. The Wildlife Institute of India, the National Maritime Foundation and the Wildlife Conservation Society’s BlueMAP India project all describe the same four, running from the highest degree of protection to the lowest.

Nothing in that list is specifically marine. The Act does not create a separate marine category. India’s marine protected areas are ordinary protected areas that happen to sit on the coast or in the sea, which is the first clue to why counting them is harder than it sounds.

The Act is also not the whole framework. The Coastal Regulation Zone Notification, 2019, issued under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, governs what may and may not be built or discharged along the coast, with particular attention to mangroves, seagrasses, corals and coral reefs, and turtle nesting grounds. The Biological Diversity Act, 2002 sits alongside both. These are regulatory regimes rather than protected-area designations, and the distinction matters when you are trying to work out what is actually protected where.

For comparison across countries there is a single agreed definition, adopted by the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2004 and quoted in the same terms by the International Collective in Support of Fishworkers and by the National Maritime Foundation. A marine protected area, in those terms, is any area within or adjacent to the marine environment, together with its overlying waters and associated flora, fauna and historical and cultural features, which has been reserved by legislation or other effective means, including custom, with the effect that its marine or coastal biodiversity enjoys a higher level of protection than its surroundings. That definition is worth holding on to. It is applied the same way everywhere, which is what makes the international coverage figures later in this article comparable in a way the national counts are not.

The four designations, and what each one allows

This is the question readers actually arrive with, and it is the one most easily-found pages skip. They tend to classify Indian marine protected areas by the habitat inside them, such as reefs, mangroves or lagoons, which describes what a site contains rather than what the law permits there.

The four categories form a ladder:

 

Designation Broad character Typical use
National Park The most restrictive tier Research and education are the primary permitted activities
Wildlife Sanctuary Restrictive, but less absolute Certain regulated activities may be permitted under specified conditions
Conservation Reserve Designed around sustainable use Often adjoins a park or sanctuary as a buffer, and sustainable resource use is contemplated
Community Reserve The most participatory tier Managed with and by local communities

Two cautions belong with that table. The first is that it describes general character, not a schedule of rules. What is permitted at any individual site is set by the Act together with that site’s own notification, so two wildlife sanctuaries can differ substantially. If you need to know whether a particular activity is lawful at a particular place, the notification is the document to read.

The second is that none of these tiers should be assumed to mean no extraction of any kind. “No-take” is a specific concept, and it is not a synonym for “protected area” in Indian law.

The reserve categories are not theoretical. India’s first Dugong Conservation Reserve, covering 448.34 sq km of Palk Bay in Tamil Nadu, was notified on 21 September 2022 to protect dugongs and the seagrass meadows they feed on. The environment ministry restated the figure as about 450 sq km in December 2023. That is the conservation-reserve tier applied in a marine setting.

Illustration showing a hierarchy of conservation areas from national parks and wildlife sanctuaries to conservation and community reserves, with increasing community participation and protection | Ocean Evoke India
Why the number keeps changing

Here are the four figures, with their owners and dates set out plainly:

 

Count Source Date Stated scope
31 MPAs, 6,271.2 sq km H. S. Singh, Indian Journal of Geo-Marine Sciences 32(3) September 2003 Areas “primarily in marine environment”
24 mainland, more than 100 island Wildlife Institute of India Data as on 1 April 2014 Protected areas within 500 m of the high tide line, plus the marine environment
25 mainland, 130 island National Maritime Foundation May 2021 Protected areas falling entirely or partially within 500 m landward of the high tide line, seaward extent limited to the territorial sea
130 Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, written reply in the Lok Sabha December 2023 Not stated

 

Two things stand out. The first is the date column. The figures of 31 marine protected areas and 6,271.2 sq km trace to a paper published in September 2003, twenty-three years ago, and they still circulate widely today with no date attached at all. A well-known exam-preparation page updated in February 2023 states that India has 31 marine protected areas as a present-tense fact, without a citation.

The second is the scope column, which is empty for the source with the most public reach. The ministry’s reply does not say what it counted, gives no total area and gives no list, so there is no way to check the figure against it.

The two sources that do state a rule state the same one. The Wildlife Institute of India explains that protected areas falling entirely or partially within a 500-metre band from the high tide line, together with the marine environment, are treated as part of India’s marine protected area network. The National Maritime Foundation, writing independently seven years later, describes the same 500-metre test drawn from the Coastal Regulation Zone notification, and adds the seaward limit: under the Wildlife (Protection) Act an area’s protection reaches only as far as the territorial sea, twelve nautical miles from the baseline. That convergence matters. It is a working convention rather than a definition written into the Act, and it should not be read as one, but it is plainly the convention the larger counts are built on, and it is a worked example of how a broad rule produces a large number.

Follow the arithmetic and the disagreement dissolves. Using that rule, the Wildlife Institute counted 24 marine protected areas on the mainland, and 105 protected areas in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, all of them treated as part of the network. The National Maritime Foundation, counting independently seven years later and arriving at different totals, reached the same structural conclusion: the islands hold the overwhelming majority of the sites.

Look at the published tables of those island sites and the character of the count becomes clear. In the Wildlife Institute’s 2014 data, Goose Island and Rowe Island are each recorded at 0.01 sq km, Snake Island-II and Curlew Island at 0.03 sq km apiece, and Arial, Bamboo, Egg and Gander Islands at 0.05 sq km each. The pattern is not an artefact of one table: an independent listing published by the International Collective in Support of Fishworkers in 2008 records Pitti at 0.01 sq km, South Button at 0.03 sq km, and Blister, Sandy, Parkinson and Mangroves Islands between 0.26 and 0.39 sq km. Sites of this size are the ordinary building blocks of the island count, not its outliers.

The scale of what that adds up to is worth pausing on. Roughly a hundred separate designations sit behind the island half of the count, and a large share of them are sites of well under a square kilometre. A count is a tally of designations. It is not a measurement of protected sea.

None of this is a case against the small island sanctuaries. A site of a few hectares can be exactly what a seabird colony or a turtle beach requires, and area is a poor proxy for ecological value. The point is narrower and purely arithmetical: a rising count does not tell you that more sea is being protected, and it should not be read as though it does.

How much sea is actually protected

For that, you need a percentage rather than a tally.

Two assessments, published by different bodies, put it in the same narrow band. The World Database on Protected Areas, compiled by the UN Environment Programme’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre and published as a World Bank development indicator, records India’s marine protected areas at 0.3% of territorial waters for 2024 and 2025, having sat at 0.2% in every year from 2015 to 2023. The Nature Conservation Index, published in October 2024 by the Goldman Sonnenfeldt School of Sustainability and Climate Change and BioDB, put the figure at 0.2% of national waters.

So the honest statement is a range, not a decimal: somewhere around a fifth to a third of one per cent. The two bodies disagree slightly, as bodies measuring this tend to, and the disagreement is smaller than the gap between any two of the counts in the previous section.

Three qualifications keep that number honest.

The denominator is territorial waters, the belt extending twelve nautical miles from the baseline, and not India’s Exclusive Economic Zone, which reaches to 200 nautical miles and covers about 2.02 million sq km. That distinction is not a technicality here. The seaward reach of a marine protected area under the Wildlife (Protection) Act stops at the territorial sea, so the Exclusive Economic Zone lies almost entirely outside the protected-area system by construction. The National Maritime Foundation notes that of the 106 sites identified as important for coastal and marine biodiversity, exactly one, Angria Bank, falls within the Exclusive Economic Zone, and it is identified rather than notified. The Nature Conservation Index reaches the same conclusion from the other direction, recording no marine protected area coverage in India’s Exclusive Economic Zone at all.

These assessments also apply their own international definitions, not any Indian counting rule, so their percentages cannot be reconciled arithmetically with the counts of 31, 130 or 155. They are a different measurement, not a tie-breaker.

And no current, authoritative figure for the total area of India’s marine protected area network could be found for this article. The most widely circulated area figure remains the 2003 paper’s 6,271.2 sq km. Adding partial totals drawn from different years and different definitions together would produce a number that means nothing, so it is more useful to say plainly that the current national total is not published in any source located here.

What the series does show is the shape of the thing. On the World Bank indicator the measured share of territorial waters under protection held flat for nine consecutive years before moving by a tenth of a percentage point.

Where India’s marine protected areas are

The best-known sites are spread across the coast and the islands. On the mainland: the Gulf of Kachchh in Gujarat, the Gulf of Mannar in Tamil Nadu, Gahirmatha and Bhitarkanika in Odisha, the Sundarbans in West Bengal, and Malvan in Maharashtra. In the Andaman and Nicobar Islands: the Mahatma Gandhi Marine National Park and the Rani Jhansi Marine National Park, alongside the long list of much smaller island sanctuaries.

That distribution is the same pattern the counting section describes, seen from the other side. The islands hold the great majority of the individual sites, while the mainland sites tend to be individually larger.

What sits alongside the protected areas

Beyond the notified sites, 106 coastal and marine locations have been identified and prioritised as Important Coastal and Marine Biodiversity Areas. The Wildlife Institute of India identified them, and they have been proposed as future conservation or community reserves. The figure appears in the institute’s own work and again in the environment ministry’s December 2023 reply, unchanged.

The word to hold on to is identified. An ICMBA is a candidate site, not a protected one. Counting these alongside notified protected areas would overstate India’s protection considerably, and they are a useful reminder that the map of what is recognised as ecologically important is much larger than the map of what is legally protected.

The Coastal Regulation Zone regime works differently again. It restricts activity along the coast without designating protected areas, so a stretch of shore can be regulated under the 2019 notification without appearing in any protected-area count.

Reading any MPA figure you meet

The practical residue of all this is a habit rather than a number. When you next meet a figure for India’s marine protected areas, in a news report, a presentation, or an exam guide, three questions will tell you most of what you need:

  1. What is being counted? Sites primarily in the sea, or every protected area that touches it? The two rules produce numbers that differ by a factor of four.
  2. When was it counted? The most-repeated area figure in Indian search results is from 2003 and is almost never dated.
  3. What is the denominator? A percentage of territorial waters is not a percentage of the Exclusive Economic Zone, and neither is a percentage of the continental shelf.

 

A figure that survives all three is worth quoting. Most do not.

Conclusion

India’s marine protected areas are best understood as four legal designations, unevenly distributed, doing quite different jobs, and considerably harder to add up than the published numbers suggest. The count depends on where you draw the line at the shore. The coverage figure does not, which is why the coverage figure is the more useful measure.

Both numbers get used to describe the same thing, and they tell you different things. Across 2015 to 2023 the share of India’s territorial waters recorded as protected held flat at 0.2%, while the counts in circulation over the same broad period ranged from twenty-four-plus-a-hundred to a hundred and fifty-five depending on who was counting and what they chose to include. If you were deciding how to judge whether marine conservation in India is working, which of those two numbers would you want on the record?

Sources

 

 

Aqua Lung
Canon
Go Pro
Ikelite
Insta 360
Mares
Nauticam
PADI
Shearwater
TDI
Rotary Club of Calcutta South CIty
Kuddle Life Foundation
Coastal Impact