In Chirgaon, Residents and Conservationists Work To Bring Back Their Vultures 27/07/2021 A long billed vulture. Representative image. Photo: Arindam Aditya/Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 A small village in Maharashtra’s Raigad region is on its way to revive its vulture population. The collective efforts of the locals and conservation organisations have seen the local vulture population in Chirgaon village rise to 249 this year, from 22 in 1999-2000 when nationally, the vulture population was sharply declining. In the 1980s, India was home to around 40 million vultures primarily belonging to three species – white-backed, long-billed and slender-billed. By 2017, that number had declined to 19,000. The sharp slide – as much as 90% in some species – prompted the government of India to launch the National Vulture Conservation Action Plan 2020-25 in 2019. The conservation plan looks to not just halt this decline but also actively increase the number of vultures in India by 2025.