The Hindu : Opinion / News Analysis : Saving the tiger

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Apr 11, 2004

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

Saving the tiger

Dr. Rajesh Gopal, Director, Project Tiger, Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India, writes:

Apropos your editorial captioned `Saving the Tiger,' which appeared on March 26. As the national coordinator of this project, I wish to highlight the factual position to put things in perspective.

At the outset, the magnitude of conservation initiatives taken in a developing country like India by launching the holistic `Project Tiger' has no parallel in the world. We must not forget the basic fact that with just 2 per cent of the global forest area, we cater to almost 16 per cent of world's human population and an equal percentage of global livestock. Project Tiger has been sensitive to this and hence has the `core-buffer' strategy to address the concerns of wild animals as well as stakeholder people. No outsider or foreign agency will be in a position to appreciate this, leave alone research groups doling out fantastic computer-simulated models with seemingly unrealistic predictions, without understanding our conditions and village rhythm. Many such groups prophesied the extinction of tigers in our country by the year 2000!

There are affluent countries with more than 15,000 captive tigers in private collections and one does not know their fate. Many such animals end up in organised hunts and the body parts cater to the thriving international illegal trade. Certain other tiger range countries import and export live tigers and their future is also tentative. We have been voicing our concerns in this regard in international conventions. Thus the international organisations as well as scientific community might as well focus their attention on such issues and help a developing country like India in its conservation efforts, rather than finding fault over issues without proper ground truthing.

The official tiger estimation relating to 1997 was 3,508, while the figures stands at 3,642 during 2001-02. The contention of the PNAS [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States] is cut off from basic facts and has not incorporated the ongoing initiatives and refinements in Project Tiger. This undoubtedly puts a question mark on its credibility. It is erroneous to contend that pugmarks alone are taken into consideration for estimating the tiger population. On the contrary, pugmarks are one among a number of parameters such as stride, straddle, vocalisation, scrapes, kill evidences, livestock depredation, local enquiry and the like, which are collected as per a standardised protocol for ascertaining the spatial presence of the tiger during the census/estimation period. This is an exercise in `time and space' in which such evidences, which highlight the presence of tigers, are collected in an organised manner and tallied to eliminate the duplicates. Further, this is also not an `isolated event' occurring in a fixed periodicity, but is a complementing initiative to cross-check the ongoing tiger monitoring data from patrolling units/beats in the Tiger Reserves. Thus the entire exercise amounts to almost mapping the tiger distribution in the country, and, unlike the sampling approach, does not involve extrapolation based on assumptions and restricted study. It goes without saying that pugmarks are the most prominent evidence one can ever see in any tiger habitat.

The sampling-based approaches as advocated by several workers, are really not suited since the distribution of tigers is not uniform, but rather skewed in a habitat. Any amount of stratification may not help here since the spatio-temporal use of habitat by tiger is governed by climate, availability of welfare factors, anti-predator strategy of prey animals, presence of livestock in fringe villages and territorial advertisements of conspecifics. These parameters can be taken into account only through a `supervised', prior knowledge of the habitat based on field evidences like pugmarks and others, which can be readily collected in the field.

While no method can be claimed to be perfect, without a viable, field-friendly and cost-effective alternative, it is not wise to criticise the pugmark method. The camera trap method, advocated by many scientists, having a fancy for `capture recapture' softwares, is most unsuitable and has its inherent drawbacks. Though a good method for non-territorial, small mammals, it has a serious statistical bias in the sense it is efficient only in estimating high density population. Most of the tiger population in Protected Area network or outside is low or moderate (less than 1 or 1 per 100 sq. km.). Only few areas have high density ranging from 2 - 5 per 100 sq. km., but even here, the skewed density distribution causes problem in statistical experimental designs. Therefore, to obtain a reliable estimate (coefficient of variation less than 10 per cent) at least 60 per cent of the tiger population needs to be `captured' and `recaptured' by cameras, which is impossible! The model does not provide for statistically working out the individual ID of tiger, nor it incorporates any error due to misidentification. It is relevant to add, experts in the Wildlife Institute of India have demonstrated the magnitude of misidentification from stripes of tiger on which the methodology is based. In addition, the camera trap method needs lot of experimental design from experts and the operative design is not `generic' but `site specific', apart from not being cost-effective.

It is true that habitat loss, fragmentation and illegal trade are causative factors for decline of tiger population in its range countries. India has responded to this situation by creating tiger reserves as already highlighted in your editorial. Hunting of any wild animal is banned since the promulgation of our National Wildlife Legislation — the Wildlife Protection Act in 1972. In the present context we do not have large-scale hunting of wild animals which form prey of tiger as contended by Ullas Karanth. I wish to reiterate that habitat loss and the illegal international markets are more relevant in the present context. The natural landscape of tiger in many states having sizeable tiger population in our country has privileges like livestock grazing, and thus cattle also becomes important as a prey animal due to chance depredation by tigers, and high densities of natural prey animals may not occur in many places yet sustain tigers.

The success of conservation initiatives in a developing country like India depends on reduction of resource dependency of local people on forests through meaningful participatory eco-development and joint protection of forests, which are ongoing.

The Ministry of Environment & Forests is now in the process of developing a `Tiger habitat and population evaluation system' for the Indian subcontinent in the GIS domain. The objectives take care of the tiger sociology as well as the prevailing ground situation. The habitat as well as status of tigers in the country is being assessed for developing site-specific census and monitoring protocols. The information collected and analysed in the GIS domain would be disseminated to Field Managers apart from conducting regional workshops and training to apprise the field staff in census, habitat monitoring, evaluation and field monitoring techniques. This exercise, using the state-of-the-art technology, would involve mapping satellite and field date collection, GIS modelling and validation. The `tiger atlas' so generated would also serve as a benchmark and the evaluation system would be a monitoring tool to ensure that we keep the pulse of tiger population and its habitat for future generations to come. This state-of-the-art technology application to conservation should remove any doubt that may exist regarding our commitment to save tiger and its habitat.

Lastly, the `Project Tiger' Reserves thus designated, are not only to save the `key stone' species `Tiger', but to conserve the bio-diversity and essentially to conserve water, soil and replenish clear air for mankind. Therefore Project Tiger is not only about saving the tiger, but its scope expands to survival of our future generations by ensuring the life support system.

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