On April 1, 1973, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi launched Project Tiger, which was first started in 1972. Project Tiger was a wildlife conservation project - a project that tried to protect wildlife from being poached. Project Tiger created 23 tiger reserves (protected areas for tigers), said they had been successful, since the number of tigers in India had increased. But critics like conservationist Billy Arjan Singh said that tigers had only moved to India from Nepal because their habitat in Nepal had been destroyed - not because of wildlife policy in India.