| Edited by Claire George <Editor's Note> |
It is a well known fact that the tiger in the Indian wild is critically endangered. At the beginning of the 20th century 40,000 of these striped animals roamed the country's jungles. Wanton killing, rising human populations and economic development leading to shrinking habitats brought their numbers to a perilous low of around 2,000 by the end of the 1960s. That is when the country woke up to the need to protect this magnificent beast.
It was at the initiative of that most proactive of politicians, Indira Gandhi, that Project Tiger was launched in 1973. Its objective was to "ensure a viable population of tiger[s] in India for scientific, economic, aesthetic, cultural and ecological values…"
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| Succeeding for a short while, the project helped boost numbers to around 3,500 in the course of a couple of decades. However, a slow approach to protection coupled with a raging demand for tiger body parts in East Asia saw numbers plummet again. The last census, organized earlier this century, pegged numbers at around 1,400 -- which in no way fulfills the project's objectives.
In the light of this it is disconcerting to hear reports that tigresses are vanishing in the Panna Tiger Reserve in the central Indian province of Madhya Pradesh (MP). Sariska, a popular tiger reserve near Delhi, located in the touristy northwestern province of Rajasthan, lost all its tigers to poachers in 2005, necessitating the recent introduction of two tigers -- a male and a female. And, now the same catastrophe seems to be befalling Panna.
Created in 1981, Panna National Park was elevated in 1994 to tiger reserve status under Project Tiger. Situated in the picturesque Vindhyan ranges, close to the World Heritage Site of Khajuraho, the park is known as about the finest tiger habitat in the country.
All, apparently, was fine with the reserve until around 2003 when the slide seems to have commenced. With declining tiger sightings, the figures given for its tiger population in 2004 were so hotly contested that a recount had to be ordered. Although the fresh census revealed the presence of 35 tigers, the controversy about the absence of tigresses in the park never really died down. Even the Central Empowered Committee appointed by the Supreme Court, comprising inter alia the well-known Indian “tiger scientist” Valmik Thapar, had commented in 2005 on its mismanagement, predicting that the park was headed the Sariska way.
The year 2007 saw fresh reports about the vanishing tigresses of Panna. Raghu Chundawat, the famous tiger researcher of Panna, came out into the open in a national English language news channel speaking about the absence of tigresses in the park -- an observation that, he claimed, was shared by park officials. Clearly, poachers were active, as was soon proved by press reports.
The current year, too, witnessed no let up in the incidents of adverse reports. In fact, the prestigious Sanctuary Asia magazine published in its June 2008 issue vehement denials by a senior MP Forest Department official of the park’s plummeting numbers of female tigers. Asserting that it had not become a "bachelor park," he maintained, it had a healthy population of 30 odd tigers.
The same issue of the periodical, however, carried a counterpoint by Raghu Chundawat who, drawing from his technical knowledge acquired during his extended research into Panna tigers, claimed that "breeding territories" -- generally stable and constant in a secure (tiger) population -- have appreciably declined in numbers. According to him, the loss of seven such "territories" has been documented, suggesting the disappearance of 80 percent to 100 percent of Panna’s breeding tigresses.
Whatever might be the official projections, Chundawat’s contentions received support from the fact that in September 2008 the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), finding a nonviable male-female ratio, advised the MP Forest Department to introduce more tigresses into the park.
Quite obviously, lessons have not been learned from the Sariska debacle where persistent wrong reporting of tiger numbers resulted in the animal's disappearance from that popular reserve.
The tiger, after all, is not just a feature in our jungles; it is much more than that -- "a metaphor for our ecological foundation," as Bittu Sehgal, a prominent Indian naturalist, has opined. It also happens to be a "metaphor" for the country’s water, food and economic security besides being its vehicle to fight climate-change.
The need of the hour, therefore, is to set at rest all the controversies of the past and quickly initiate action to organize the relocation of a few tigresses in the park as advised by the NTCA. The best time to undertake relocation of animals, experts say, is winter, which is just round the corner and should be taken advantage of.
Unfortunately, Panna National Park has, of late, made news for all the wrong reasons. The only good news that came in about it was the recent rejection by the National Board for Wildlife of a proposal to further fragment the park by laying a railway line through it. Now that the proposed railroad is out of the way, the Central and the MP governments will do well to implement the stalled proposal of the park’s extension over the, reportedly, "ideal" tiger country. Utmost care will, of course, have to be taken to ensure protection of the carnivore and its prey base in the extended park.
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