Tiger Future Not Burning Bright in India
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by Sugita Katyal,Reuters March 28, 2005
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SARISKA, India — It was once one of the favorite hunting grounds of India's royalty.
Flamboyant maharajahs in natty breeches combed the sprawling
Sariska forest nestled in the low-lying Aravali hills in the desert
state of Rajasthan, hunting for the many tigers that roamed the
jungle.
But, today, there's an eerie silence in Sariska.
It's been months since anybody heard a tiger roar in Sariska
and activists fear the story may be the same in sanctuaries across
India, which has almost half the world's surviving tigers.
"It's probably the biggest conservation scandal in modern
times," said Belinda Wright, executive director of the Wildlife
Protection Society of India.
"There are some parks with none
or so few tigers it's not a viable population. Sariska has been an
incredible wakeup call."
A recent World Wide Fund-India
report says there may be no tigers left in Sariska, a rich deciduous
forest which until last year was home to about 16 to 18 tigers, but
where you now only see stunning peacocks and delicate spotted dear
roam freely.
"The damage to the Sariska Tiger Reserve is
likely to have taken place between July and December 2004. If any
tigers remain, their numbers are likely to be small," said the WWF
report.
Panic over India's dwindling stock of tigers really
set in after another non-government group said last month that at
least 18 of 47 tigers in the famous Ranthambore park, which is also
located in Rajasthan, could have disappeared in the past year.
Then, the Times of India said this month poachers may have
also killed six big cats, including tigers and leopards, in another
big sanctuary, Bandhavgarh in the central state of Madhya Pradesh,
between April and December last year.
Police
Investigation
Alarmed by reports of a rapid fall in tiger
numbers, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has ordered a police
investigation and created a new task force to save the endangered
species.
He also banned giving tigers to foreign dignitaries
and established a powerful wildlife crime prevention bureau.
Since the reports which have raised questions about India's
tiger conservation program, the question on everybody's lips is:
Where have all the tigers gone?
Tigers are poached for their
skin, claws and bones used in traditional Chinese medicine, and as
coat trims. A single tiger is said to be worth some $50,000.
"Trade in tiger parts is very high," said Ravi Singh, chief
of World Wide Fund-India. "For a few thousand dollars, people are
willing to kill the tiger."
A shrinking habitat and drought
are further pushing India's tigers towards extinction: according to
government figures, the tiger population fell to 3,642 in 2001 from
4,334 in 1989. A century ago, there were an estimated 40,000 tigers
in India.
"But we'd be very lucky if it's even 2,000, going
by some recent seizures," said Wright. "Every tiger reserve in India
without exception suffers from habitat pressure and poaching."
Bandhavgarh, Sariska and Ranthambore, the showpiece of
India's tiger conservation program launched in 1973, are big on the
country's wildlife tourism map. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton
spotted a tiger in Ranthambore five years ago.
The Project
Tiger conservation program was set up after India first woke up to
its tiger crisis when it discovered the population of the big cats
had dropped to an alarming 1,800 after years of hunting during the
British raj.
During colonial times, shooting for recreation
was a common pastime and people normally laid traps and used bait
such as tethered goats to lure tigers.
Many royals decorated
the walls of their palaces with stuffed tiger heads and had
themselves photographed posing with great panache over a tiger
carcass.
Villages Inside Reserve
While the
circumstances vary from park to park, animal rights activists say
Sariska exemplifies the overall state of the country's wildlife
management.
Wildlife teams scouring the Sariska reserve for
tiger pug marks found no foot prints in December compared with 178
in the same month in the previous year.
The number of tiger
sightings -- key evidence of tigers along with tiger droppings, the
tiger's kill and the cry of its prey -- also plunged from a peak of
388 in 1998 to just 43 last year.
"When we were young, we
didn't step out of the house in the evening because we were scared
of tigers. You could hear them roar at night," said Ram Babu
Maheshwari, a villager living in the sanctuary, as he wrapped his
grubby turban around his head.
"But now children play around
in the evening without any fear. We haven't seen a tiger in eight
years."
Traffic is heavy as some 2,500 people live inside
the sanctuary in 28 villages with about 35,000 cattle. A highway
runs through the park bringing in a steady stream of people,
especially to an ancient temple of the Hindu monkey god, Hanuman.
The people have resisted calls by the government to move out
of the reserve saying they have been living there for decades.
"So there's a constant man-animal conflict. Many tigers and
leopards have been run over," Priya Ranjan, a forest conservationist
in Sariska said.
Others say it's hard to comb such a large
forest spread over an area of 328 square miles.
"The Sariska
reserve is so large that it's not possible to have commando-style
combing," said S.R. Yadav, another forest conservationist in
Sariska.
"People expect to walk into the park and see a
tiger running after its kill in the next hour, just like on TV. But
they don't realise it's taken five years to shoot that one-hour film."
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Source: Reuters
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