India’s Missing Tigers

In response to the current crisis, the Indian government has announced a crash effort aimed at rescuing the tiger. It will create eight new tiger reserves and a new armed force to protect tigers. It also announced a $153 million program that includes additional money for anti-poaching efforts, including the hiring of retired soldiers to act as forest guards, new equipment for monitoring tigers and a tenfold increase, to $25,000 per family, in the amount it will pay villagers to relocate outside tiger reserves. Under this scheme, the government estimates it can move 200,000 people out of tiger sanctuaries. It has also set a May 15 deadline for states to come up with their own preservation strategies.

Conservationists have applauded these plans, but implementation will be tricky. "In India a lot of money can disappear just propping up an existing, faulty system," says the Wildlife Protection Society's Wright. In 2006, following the Sariska debacle, the government created a new Wildlife Crime Control Bureau to take on poachers. Two years later, the new agency still exists mostly on paper; it has yet to investigate a single poaching case. And even some of the government plan's most ambitious points can't address the scale of the problem. For instance, the government's village-relocation program sounds impressive—until one remembers that India is a teeming nation, struggling under the crush of 1.1 billion people. Aside from the high Himalayas, hardly an inch of the country has not been settled. Some 3 million people live inside India's protected forests, and an additional 4 million live in areas adjacent to them. So the pressure on tiger habitat will remain intense even after these 200,000 villagers are moved.

Karanth and some other tiger conservationists also accuse the government of "schizophrenia," since Singh's administration last year pushed through a new law that will allow traditional forest-dwelling peoples to claim ownership over forestland. Some of these tribes had previously been removed from their ancestral homes in the name of protecting wildlife and the environment, although in practice this was frequently a pretext to seize land for mining or industrial uses. The disaffected tribes turned against the government, providing fuel to India's growing insurgencies, particularly the powerful Maoist guerrillas known as Naxalites. The new tribal-rights law, then, is more than a way to correct historical injustices—it is a counterinsurgency tactic. But while existing tiger reserves will be declared off-limits to tribal claims, the new law could result in people's carving up potential tiger habitat.

The Naxalites pose other hazards to tiger recovery as well. The rebels hold sway over vast tracts of remote forest in central and eastern India that might serve as prime tiger habitat. Their presence has prevented forest officials from even attempting to count the tiger population in some areas—and rendered conservation efforts impossible. P. K. Sen, a former director of Project Tiger, has estimated that as much as 30 percent of the tiger's range in India is inaccessible due to insurgency. While there is no evidence that Naxalites are involved in tiger poaching, without wildlife protection in these lawless regions local people hunt deer and boar that would otherwise serve as food for tigers. An adult tiger must eat at least 50 deer-size animals a year to survive; the less prey, the fewer tigers.

Previous studies found that fewer than half of India's tigers lived inside official reserves. The rest inhabited other undeveloped areas. But the latest Wildlife Institute survey discovered that many of these tigers have disappeared. And it isn't hard to see why: India has lost thousands of square kilometers in forest cover over the past 20 years—the result of dam building, logging, mining and rural development. "Where humans are there, tigers are not there. Where livestock is there, tigers are not there. Where forest cover is missing, tigers are not there," Rajesh Gopal, head of the National Tiger Conservation Authority, told a meeting of India's national-park directors at Kanha in mid-March.

The conservation authority wants to preserve—and in some cases restore—forested buffer zones around national parks. It also wants to create green corridors that will allow tigers to move between protected sanctuaries. These thoroughfares are considered essential to ensuring that India's tigers do not become trapped in genetically isolated pockets. But the conservation authority has no power to create such vital corridors. Doing so will require coordinated action by state governments and multiple federal and state bureaucracies, many of which have diametrically opposed interests—exactly the sort of problem modern India is least equipped to handle.

Maintaining the national economic boom is clearly the top priority for the government. And with good reason: it is the escalator that has lifted millions of Indians out of abject poverty. But this dynamic makes the trade-offs between development and conservation tougher for the prime minister. While most believe Singh sincerely wants to save the tiger, the cat has no natural constituency: India's new business elites have not adopted the tiger as an important cause the way wealthy philanthropists in the United States and Europe have. Nor has environmental degradation in India attracted the sort of broad-based concern it has in the West. "India is hellbent on going into the sunrise of development, and the tiger has been seen as a bit of a nuisance," says Wright. "India has never seen the tiger as an asset."

One morning in Kanha in March, a tiger lay on a bed of fallen leaves at the foot of a sal tree, its dusky orange fur and black stripes making it hard to spot in the dappled sunlight that filtered through the dense forest canopy. Elephants carrying camera-wielding tourists on their backs circled the big cat as their handlers jockeyed for the best vantage point—a daily ritual that park officials have dubbed "The Tiger Show." Kanha is considered among the better-managed tiger reserves in India, one of the areas the tiger authority hopes will provide a springboard for the big cat's recovery nationwide. It has a healthy population of 89 adult cats and corridors connecting it to other forests. People living around the park are generally supportive of the tiger's presence, which has brought tourism and economic growth to the area. But watching the orange and black cat sitting under the sal tree, licking its paws, oblivious to the peril of its species, one couldn't help but think the final credits have already begun to roll on India's own long-running tiger show.

© 2008