Environment-India: Tigers not safe in own 'Home'

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Malini Shankar
The age-old conflict between man and tiger is, sadly, still manifest in this
supposedly protected sanctuary for big cats.
Three years after the so-called 'Sariska Shock' of 2004, when it was confirmed that there were no more Royal Bengal tigers in the reserve when there used to be about 22, tiger conservation authorities still have to find an arrangement acceptable to the human inhabitants of the reserve who have been partly blamed for the decline and disappearance of the animals.
About 12,000 people, along with 35,000 cattle, live in 170 villages within the reserve, which is spread across 800,000 square kilometres. Of these, 493 households in about 11 villages have been identified for relocation to give way to tigers from the Ranthambhore Reserve that will be brought here to repopulate the area.
"We graze cattle for livelihood; we cannot possibly survive outside the forests with any other means of livelihood," says Madho Rao Gujjar of Kankwadi village.
"Inside the forest we access all of Mother Nature's resources for free. All we need is legitimacy to live here," explains Ratanlal Gujjar of Umari village. But the forest department defends its plan to relocate villagers from the forests, saying that poachers had employed indigenous peoples to hunt down tigers.
In 1973, the government established Project Tiger to cope with the dwindling tiger population. But poaching continued, as gleaned from the project
figures: there were 38 poaching cases reported in 1999, 39 in 2000, 35 in 2001 and 47 in 2002.
"It is true that there are fewer tigers in the wild today than there were at the launch of Project Tiger in 1973," says R N Mehrotra, chief wildlife warden of the desert state of Rajasthan, where the reserve is located.
The Sariska shock -- which had coincided with an increase in international demand for tiger parts, skin and bones for supposedly medicinal and aphrodisiac purposes -- prompted Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to order the Tiger Task Force to investigate the matter.
In a 2005 report called 'Joining the Dots', the task force said: "People versus the tiger is the inevitable corollary of the conservation debate. . . .Villagers, sandwiched between the park administration and the tiger, are bitter about their desperately wretched existence."
In fact, the 150 poorest districts of India "are prime tiger habitats but incidentally tribal areas," it pointed out. "Enter the tiger and single males that no fiat can tie down, trying to wander from forest to shrinking forest but unable to do so".
The report said that local people should be given priority in the government's agenda because without their ameliorating their poverty, tiger conservation cannot work.
But some conservationists dismissed the report. "The biggest disservice of the … Task Force is that it introduced a new element into the debate -'people versus tigers'. Protected areas for tigers should be just that - for tigers," says Belinda Wright of the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI).
Wright also criticised government's failure to address poaching. "Government apathy toward allegations of poaching has resulted in poor investigation, and a lack of effective anti-poaching measures," she explains.
"The tragedy is that the government did not respond to the problem in the early 1990s.
Now that poaching and the illegal wildlife trade are in the hands of organised criminals, it is far more difficult."
There were also allegations that the tiger count was inflated through the use of the pugmark method. Under this method, foresters base their estimates of the tiger population in a given area on plaster cast moulds of tigers' footprints in forests.
"The pugmark method. . . is outdated, inaccurate and easy to manipulate, which is how we ended up over the years with fudged, steadily increasing figures, when in fact tiger numbers were decreasing," Wright says.
A total of 1948.255 crores (about 400 million U.S. dollars) has been spent on Project Tiger across 28 reserves in India in 34 years.
Conservationists say that had these funds been used for acquiring wireless sets, intelligence system, training of staff and the recruitment of young people into the frontline staff, the Sariska problem could perhaps have been prevented.
At present, ill-equipped, defenceless forest guards have to watch over large and extremely arduous terrain, and cannot protect themselves against poachers and wild animals.
Staff vacancies still have not been filled. In the two premier tiger reserves in Rajasthan, 51 Rangers, 107 assistant foresters and 541 forest guards still have to be appointed.
The national wildlife crime bureau that was proposed after the disappearance of tigers from the Sariska reserve has yet to become functional, pending an amendment to the Wildlife Protection Act.
There is also a proposal to create separate wildlife courts to expedite the trial of wildlife crimes.
According to WPSI, a total of 1,898 people have been charged in connection with 978 incidents of seizure of wildlife products -- tigers, leopards and otters -- across India from 1994 to 2006. Only 30 have so far been convicted.
The most celebrated conviction for a wildlife crime in recent times is that of Bollywood film star Salman Khan, who in 2006 was sentenced to five years' imprisonment and a fine of 25,000 rupees (614 dollars) for hunting an endangered Chinkara or Indian gazelle. He has appealed his sentence.
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IPS