By Peter Foster
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 30/08/2007
Peter Foster's blog
These are dark days for the Royal Bengal tiger, lord of the Indian jungle and without doubt the most mesmerising of all the great beasts of the forest. As new census figures indicate, in a few short years - perhaps a decade, maybe two - it is likely that the tiger as a truly wild animal will become extinct.
They won't all die, of course - a handful of docile and inbred examples will survive in protected forest reserves for the benefit of foreign tourists in the their safari 4x4s. But the animal that Blake used to symbolise his vengeful and pitiless God will essentially have become a tame thing, something to be gawped at in zoos and fenced-off national parks. Not real tigers, just big kitties with stripes.
How has this happened? Until quite recently, India's tigers were cited as one of the world's great conservation success stories. After India's then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, launched "Project Tiger" in 1973, tiger numbers rose steadily, from a low of 1,200 in the early 1970s to more than 3,500 a decade ago. The tiger, it seemed, was back from the brink.
It now transpires that this was a false dawn. Today, tiger numbers are back down to - at their lowest - 1,300, with leading conservationists such as Valmik Thapar predicting that the inexorable downward trend will continue.
A decade of administrative neglect - 40 per cent of Indian forest guard positions are currently vacant - and years of forest administrators cooking the books to cover up poaching losses and the endless encroachment of villages on to protected land, have put the tiger into irreversible decline.
Is it really too late? Probably, even though it seems at least that India's government has finally woken up to the crisis being faced by its national animal. Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, is now backing a new "Project Tiger", doubling the tiger conservation budget, creating a new National Tiger Conservation Authority and a dedicated Wildlife Crime Bureau to tackle the poachers head on.
It would be comforting to think all this government action will bear fruit, but there are several reasons to think that Mrs Gandhi's great solo effort of 35 years ago cannot be replicated by Mr Singh. The fear among India's conservation community, based on the bitter experience of the past decade, is that all the new bureaux, authorities and central government directives will turn out to be paper tigers, not real ones. The reasons are twofold.
Since Mrs Gandhi's day, the population of India has doubled from 560 million in 1972 to 1.1 billion today. In another 35 years, that figure will be 1.5 billion. Put simply, there just isn't enough forest - the tiger's natural habitat - to go around. For most of India's rural poor, every day is a battle to survive. Competition for resources - land, water, forest - is intense and will only become more so.
The effects of this human population pressure on the tigers are already visible: India now has only three viable tiger habitats. Even more worrying is that outside India's 28 dedicated tiger reserves - where 60 per cent of India's tigers were estimated to be living in 2002 - it was found that there simply wasn't enough prey to sustain the tigers. Day by day, the overwhelming pressure of people is driving the big cats into smaller and smaller parcels of land.
The second major reason for gloom is political. While Indira Gandhi was a political demi-god, commanding vast electoral majorities and unquestionable authority, Mr Singh's position at the head of a minority coalition is altogether more mortal. Modern Indian politics is increasingly factionalised, with regional king-makers draining power from the centre every day.
It is therefore encouraging to hear that the prime minister has written personally to all of India's chief ministers, demanding they fill those forest guard vacancies; but rather less encouraging to know that three identical letters have been dispatched from New Delhi in recent times, all to no effect.
The truth is that, for all the brave talk of saving India's national animal, whether by politicians in New Delhi or by conservationists around the world, the plight of the tiger holds little sway in the places where it actually lives.
No Indian politician ever won re-election by saving a tiger. And while reserves do bring in tourist dollars, far too much of that money disappears into the pockets of the big hotel chains and the local political elite. For tribal people, scratching a living on the land, there is all too little reason to turn down the poacher's shilling.
Source:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/08/30/do3003.xml
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