India’s Missing Tigers

Dawn at Kanha National Park in India's central highlands is welcomed with a symphony of animal sounds. The safari guides in their jeeps listen intently, straining to pick out telltale dissonant notes—the honk of a sambar, the shriek of a chital or the loud cough of a langur. These are alarm calls: they mean that somewhere out there in the high, dry grass, a tiger is on the prowl.

Kanha is one of the last strongholds of the Royal Bengal tiger, perhaps the world's fiercest terrestrial predator—and its most beautiful. The chance to glimpse that signature orange and black coat attracts tens of thousands of tourists each year, who flock to this and India's 27 other tiger reserves. Alarm calls can still be heard in the Kanha dawn, but many of India's jungles have fallen disturbingly quiet.

The government-run Wildlife Institute of India shocked the nation—and tiger lovers worldwide—in February when it released a rigorous scientific survey estimating India had just 1,411 tigers left, a decline of more than 60 percent in five years. Previous surveys had overestimated tiger numbers, but the new figures placed the big cat on the cusp of extinction. India has pledged to save the tiger, but as the nation grows richer the task is becoming much more difficult. In the 1970s, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi presided over a rigid, largely socialist economy that limped along at what has often been derided as "the Hindu rate of growth": a mere 3.5 percent. But she also had the centralized authority needed to launch a successful conservation campaign. Today India is a charging capitalist elephant, barreling forward at 9 percent a year. But with economic growth the supreme political priority, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh—who perches precariously atop an increasingly unwieldy and decentralized power structure—is finding it much harder to help the great cat.

Although tigers have been endangered for decades, many experts had long held out hope that the species could be rescued. Now even the optimists sound downbeat. "My grandchildren may not see tigers in their lifetime," says Ashok Kumar, vice chairman of the Wildlife Trust of India, a prominent conservation group. Already, three tiger subspecies—the Bali, Caspian and Java tigers—have vanished, victims of hunting and development, and no more than 200 Siberian tigers now stalk Russia's Far East. The Bengal tiger—whose population in India accounts for about half of all wild tigers in existence—seems headed down a similar path.

India has been here before: in the early 1970s its tiger population—estimated at close to 40,000 at the end of the 19th century—had fallen below 2,000. Spurred to action, Indira Gandhi, the iron lady of Indian politics and a great lover of the tigers, banned its hunting and launched one of the most ambitious conservation programs in history: Project Tiger. Stringent wildlife-protection laws were passed, dozens of reserves were ultimately created, thousands of villagers were forcibly relocated outside these parks, guards were hired to protect wildlife from poaching and programs were established to preserve forest land as well as the deer, antelope and bison on which tigers prey. Within 15 years, tiger populations had not only stabilized, they had come bounding back—more than doubling, according to many estimates.

But in the following 15 years, Project Tiger lost its way. Complacency, neglect and corruption plagued the project, according to an Indian auditor general's report from 2006. The money dwindled, and what was appropriated was often siphoned off for other purposes by state governments. Forest guards lacked equipment—including radios, guns and even simple boots. Vacancies also went unfilled, and as the average age of the guards and rangers crept toward 50, the frequency of foot patrols—essential for monitoring tigers and deterring poaching—declined. When new forest officials were hired, they were often politically connected city slickers ignorant of the jungle.

The Forest Department also began taking on wider responsibilities, diluting its once narrow focus on protecting wildlife. Park directors were judged as much for the work they did promoting rural development and tourism as for tiger protection. "The huge sums of money available for ecodevelopment led to a mission drift," says Ullas Karanth, a leading tiger researcher who works with the Wildlife Conservation Society in India. "The Forest Department got distracted."