Last week, a forest guard was shot in Odisha’s Similipal tiger reserve, he took two bullets to the chest from poachers, who were escaping with a deer they had killed in the forest.
It was in April this year Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that India’s total tiger population now stands at 3167.
The PM was commemorating 50 years of Project Tiger that was launched in 1972.
Once upon a time, India was home to an estimated 100,000 tigers. A majority of the wild cats killed by the erstwhile British rulers who felt they would harm agriculture.
It was a very stupid logic. And it leaves India and Indians with the million dollar question: Whose job is to save the tigers? It is a job of every Indian to protect tigers and reduce the man-animal conflict.
At India’s largest Corbett Tiger Reserve in Uttaranchal, young female guards with automatic rifles scour parts of the forest to keep a check on wild animals and birds. They are actually in the belly of the beasts.
The hazards of the job have been highlighted on several occasions. For instance, Sherni on Amazon Prime is a grim and uncomfortable movie revolving around the pitfalls of wildlife conservation. The movie shows how poorly armed forest guards bound by stringent guidelines are pitted against poachers and villagers with no rules.
In India, many guards do not have walkie-talkies, as it is reserved for emergencies in reserves like Corbett. The guards can only wait for help to arrive, or run to get help. It is not easy in most of the forests in India where handsets do not work and lights powered by solar panels go out around midnight. Worse, you cannot even flash a torchlight on an animal. You need to be patient, you need to wait.
Most tiger guards work in two shifts and walk over 12-15 kms every day. They do not get vehicles unless it is an emergency.
In Corbett, the number of tigers has been increasing in the reserve; currently the number is 231. The tiger census report released in 2019 used thousands of camera traps, tracking carnivore signs across 150,000 square miles. The report said India’s total tiger population rose to 2,967 in 2018, about 700 more than in 2014. And now it is a little over 3000.
There are only 4,000 tigers left in the wild. The WWF says since the start of the 20th century, over 95 percent of the world's tiger population has been lost.
In India, Corbett has the highest tiger density among India’s 50 tiger reserves - with 14 tigers per sq km..
The guards are also at risk. As many as 12 guards have been killed by the big cats in the last two decades in Corbett alone, some of the animals identified as man eaters and removed from the reserve.
This March, the Central government told Parliament that a total of 551 tigers have died in the last five years and among them, 114 fell prey to poachers. According to the International Ranger Federation, 31 forest field staff lost their lives on duty in India in 2021. Only eight were cases of homicide. Others were killed in forest fires, elephant and rhino attacks, and motor accidents.
New rules must be implemented in the tiger reserves so that movement of people is restricted. And most important is awareness about the lives of the wild cats.
Corbett has been in the news for all kinds of reasons, including the poaching of seven tuskers that rattled the forest in 2000-1.
A Bollywood supernatural movie, Kaal, was shot inside the reserve in 2004. And in 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi teamed up with survivalist Bear Grylls and braved the rain and cold of the Corbett reserve for a Discovery show.
Wildlife experts say better monitoring and stricter wildlife policies have helped tiger population grow to its largest in over two decades.
But tiger attacks have always haunted officials of wildlife reserves in India, and those who live in the vicinity of the forest. One must remember that only on rare occasions, a tiger or tigress turns into a man-eater. In the rest of the cases, it is nothing but a panic attack from the animal.
In most of India’s tiger reserves, villagers create a furore if anyone from the village is killed by a wild animal. There have been occasions when a villager killed by a bear is mistaken for a tiger victim. Often elephants, wild boars, leopards get caught in this huge animal-human conflict.
A WWF-UNEP report said the following: “Human-wildlife conflict - when struggles arise from people and animals coming into contact and that is the biggest challenge of all tiger reserves.” There is a serious need to build new models of conservation for tiger habitats outside of protected areas (PAs). Ideally, we need conservation approaches and models that are inclusive of people and applicable in these landscapes.
Forest guards are largely at a loss in their conservation efforts and are in the crosshair of villagers living close to the forests. And then, tiger habitats are routinely cut by roads and railways, fields, factories and mines.
India is home to more than half of the world's 3,900 tigers living in the wild. The World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) says since the beginning of the 20th century over 95 percent of the world tiger population has been lost.
India needs to demarcate wildlife constituencies. The biggest menace is commercialisation of land on the fringes of the reserve forests, unplanned tourism and free movement inside the forests. One needs to reverse this trend and expand the tigers’ area of occupancy. People who have lived near the forests need to be made a part of the tiger conservation process.
There is a growing need for and benefit of participatory models, because the economy of villages in and around the reserves is based on agriculture, labour, livestock and forest produce but this economy isn’t in good shape.
In India, territorial forests are managed with commercial forestry interest but it is not a profitable venture for the government. Over the last decade, the Indian government has spent Rs 2,000 crore more than it has generated from tiger forests. Tiger conservation has to be handled at the policy level, the Centre and the states need to get involved. So discussions to protect the wild cats must happen between the government and wildlife experts.
A tiger kills a human being because it runs 'less faster' than a deer. It is important to stay away from the wild cats and allow them to breed in their natural habitat..
The author is Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha), Chairman, Parliamentary Standing Committee on Transport, Tourism and Culture.
