I admit I’d hoped for something a little more exciting after a seven-and-a-half-hour journey from New Delhi to one of India’s best-known wildlife parks. It’s not that we didn’t see any wildlife when we made the trek late last month to the Corbett National Park in the northern state of Uttaranchal.
On our outing to the forests and grass lands of the 1300-square-kilometre park we saw 4 deer, 3 wild boar, 2 rabbits, lots of monkeys—and a giant frog. But this is also India’s oldest tiger sanctuary, home to 162 Bengal tigers. And we didn’t see a single one.
Gopal Dutt Sayal, general manager of the hotel we stayed at, warns tourists that although the park, named after British hunter-turned-conservationist Jim Corbett, is known for having one of the highest concentrations of tigers in the country, they shouldn’t get their hopes up. ‘There’s roughly only a four percent chance of seeing a tiger,’ says Sayal, a qualified naturalist.
However, he adds that the 162 tigers recorded in 2009 was still a healthy increase on the 134 counted the year before.
It’s a rare piece of good news for conservation efforts surrounding the biggest of the big cats, and India’s national animal. WWF India says at the turn of the 20th century, India had an estimated 40,000 wild tigers. Yet by 2002, a pugmark (footprint) census indicated the number had fallen to 3,642. A landmark 2008 monitoring exercise, meanwhile, suggested that the decline was even more alarming, claiming there were only 1,411 tigers left.
It’s not as if the government hasn’t recognised the problem. In 1972, India launched Project Tiger, a wildlife conservation movement aimed at protecting the Bengal tiger, after the first-ever national census conducted that year found there were only 1,827 tigers left. The ambitious project was, in fact, initiated at the Corbett National Park, and funds were allocated for protecting the tiger, while hunting the animal was also banned. Now, there are more than 40 tiger reserves across the country under Project Tiger.
And initially, the project was met with significant success, with the population of tigers climbing from 1,200 in the 1970s to 3,500 in the 1990s. But, the 2008 study, Status of Tigers, Co-Predators and Prey in India, conducted by the Wildlife Institute of India in association with the National Tiger Conservation Authority using camera traps, sounded the alarm and banished any possibility of complacency.
So why do the national numbers keep falling? Loss of habitat is typically blamed, but some recent reports have suggested the bigger problem is actually an increase in poaching, prompting some to question whether the emphasis should be more on policing the situation than an environmental awareness drive.
Last year saw a spike in tiger deaths around the country’s national parks, with the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI), a respected non-profit, putting the death tally for the year at 85.
Indian tigers are being killed as part of a lucrative trade in their bones for use in Oriental medicine, especially since the decimation of the tiger in the Far East compelled traditional medicine manufactures to look for sources overseas. WPSI research says poaching for this reason started in northern India in the mid-1980’s, and that tigers are now being killed for relatively small amounts of money by tribes who know the forests well.
Poaching is a punishable offence in India under the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972, and violators can be jailed for up to three years. For offences committed inside the core area of a tiger reserve, there’s a mandatory prison term of three years, extendable to seven years and a fine of Rs. 50,000 ($1,125) extendable to Rs. 2 lakhs.
Yet despite these penalties, the laws are difficult to enforce and to date, in spite of hundreds of cases of poaching, only 16 people have been convicted of killing a tiger.
But Samir Sinha, who heads the India office of TRAFFIC, the joint conservation programme of WWF and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, disputes the idea that an emphasis on closer monitoring and policing is mutually exclusive to broader conservation efforts.
‘It’s not an either or situation,’ Sinha says. ‘Both habitat conservation and protection have to work together. Saving the tiger is a combination of all these efforts.’
However, although he believes in the importance of environmental factors, Sinha is careful not to downplay the importance of poaching, which he says really came to attention in 1993 and 1994, when the organised nature and scale of such crimes became clear.
‘We’ve seen in the Panna and Sariska tiger reserves how poaching can wipe out entire tiger populations’ he says. ‘Even at the leadership level, there’s an increasing awareness that we aren’t dealing with small-time guys, and it’s now time to demonstrate that we mean serious business.’
Sayal, though, says that in Corbett, at least, he’s never heard of any poaching incidents. Instead, he says that the battle here is between the tigers and locals for the right to survive. ‘People near the reserve are dependent on their cattle,’ Sayal says. ‘If local cattle are hunted, villagers poison the meat so that the tiger dies. We need to understand that human-inflicted death of the tiger is often to protect livelihoods.’
He believes that government schemes therefore need to be focused on spreading awareness amongst stakeholders and should not waste crores of rupees on broad public campaigns. He points to the recently launched and high-profile Save Our Tigers public awareness initiative by a corporate telecom company—with its messages plastered around billboards and in newspapers—as a prime example of a misguided emphasis on urban centres.
‘[Effective] tiger conservation is led more by NGOs, who have done excellent work,’ he says. ‘Some have even distributed LPG cylinders to villagers so they don’t need to rely on driftwood and forest resources.’
Sayal had particular praise for the Corbett Foundation, which he says has followed a ‘holistic’ approach that includes immediately compensating each human death due to wildlife with Rs. 50,000 to try to ensure locals do not try to take revenge on tigers or leopards.
Dr. K. Sankar, a professor and research coordinator at the Wildlife Institute of India, says India faces some critical policy decisions if it is to ensure the tiger’s long-term survival.
‘The situation is under control now as far as poaching is concerned,’ Sankar says. ‘But we need to urgently create inviolate space for tigers by relocating villages from the tiger reserves, restoring forest connectivity between tiger occupied landscapes and through effective forest protection.’
Sankar says there’s been some success in re-introducing tigers in areas like Sariska and Panna, but he suggests there is still much that we don’t know about tigers in the wild. ‘Radio-collaring studies should be encouraged in tiger reserves to understand their movement, ranging patterns, food habits and tiger-human conflicts,’ he says.
Since the demise of the south China tigers—experts reckon there are only about 20 left in the wild now—India has been left with the largest tiger population in the world. The species very survival depends on it now taking a lead.