India’s Missing Tigers

At exactly this moment, India's tigers began facing a new and ominous threat. Booming economic growth in neighboring China has accelerated the demand for tiger skins—a fashion symbol in Tibet—and bones, an important ingredient in traditional medicines and aphrodisiacs. With no wild tigers left in China, India has become the prime source for the illegal trade. Organized gangs of poachers travel the country, systematically targeting India's reserves and decimating its tiger population. In the past 10 years, India has seized the bones and skins of more than 800 tigers—eight hides were captured just last week—and this is assumed to be just a fraction of the total killed.

Wildlife biologists conducting field studies in reserves reported that tigers were vanishing, but officials refused to acknowledge the precipitous decline. "Poaching was just not taken seriously," says Belinda Wright, executive director of the Wildlife Protection Society of India, a group that works with the police to crack poaching rings. Directors could be transferred or demoted for reporting falling tiger populations. Besides, the cats meant tourist dollars, which created a perverse incentive to cover up poaching. So Project Tiger clung to inflated estimates derived from analyzing tiger-paw prints, long after experts had shown that such data were unreliable. In some cases, conservationists suspect, officials deliberately fudged the numbers. In 2005 the government claimed that there were 18 tigers in Sariska, the closest reserve to Delhi, but a study found it had been completely cleaned out by poachers—not a single tiger remains.

In the wake of this scandal, the Indian government disbanded Project Tiger and replaced it with a new National Tiger Conservation Authority, mandated to bring the tiger back. Repeating the success of the 1970s and 1980s, however, will be difficult. Not only are population pressures worse and poachers more organized, but India's political and economic dynamics have been transformed.

"Indira Gandhi made Project Tiger happen," Kumar says. Gandhi presided over what was essentially a one-party state: her Congress party not only controlled India's federal government, as it had since independence, but it controlled most state governments as well. That's critical, because forests in India are state property, and states have a large say over logging and mining projects. "Indira could pick up the phone," says Kumar, "and call any chief minister [the top state official] and say, 'Why haven't you declared a sanctuary?' and they would do it because no one dared defy her."

Current Prime Minister Singh, meanwhile, is no Indira Gandhi. She was a charismatic populist. He's a technocrat who took the prime minister's job after Sonia Gandhi, Indira's daughter-in-law and current head of the ruling Congress party, declined the post. It's Sonia who now calls the shots in the Congress party, not Singh, and both have failed to use their offices as bully pulpits on tiger conservation.

Unlike in Indira Gandhi's day, moreover, Congress's power now depends on the most fragile of coalitions. With a general election expected next year, the party is wary of any action that may cost it votes, particularly among the rural villagers who live alongside India's last tigers. At the same time, many of India's state governments are now in the hands of regional parties that did not exist in Indira Gandhi's time and over which Congress and the central government in New Delhi have little leverage. "The problem is, the land is owned and managed by state governments," says Karanth. "They don't feel they are part of this. Unless we have models of tiger conservation that are almost state specific, it will be very difficult to effect recovery."

Many chief ministers, however, are more interested in feathering their own political nests than in conservation. And as wildlife advocates like to point out, tigers don't vote. Nor do they bring in wads of money—unlike industrial developers who want to build hydroelectric dams or bauxite mines in the middle of prime tiger habitat. The states are also hypersensitive to anything that might be construed as undue meddling on their turf by New Delhi, complicating a national recovery plan. Rather than accepting the disturbing results of the latest Wildlife Institute study, some states that have lost large numbers of tigers, such as Orissa—where the chief minister hails from Congress's rival Bharatiya Janata Party—have insisted the government numbers are wrong and ordered their own recounts, wasting time and money that could be spent saving those tigers that remain.