Yet despite these penalties, the laws are difficult to enforce and to date, in spite of hundreds of cases of poaching, only 16 people have been convicted of killing a tiger.
But Samir Sinha, who heads the India office of TRAFFIC, the joint conservation programme of WWF and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, disputes the idea that an emphasis on closer monitoring and policing is mutually exclusive to broader conservation efforts.
‘It’s not an either or situation,’ Sinha says. ‘Both habitat conservation and protection have to work together. Saving the tiger is a combination of all these efforts.’
However, although he believes in the importance of environmental factors, Sinha is careful not to downplay the importance of poaching, which he says really came to attention in 1993 and 1994, when the organised nature and scale of such crimes became clear.
‘We’ve seen in the Panna and Sariska tiger reserves how poaching can wipe out entire tiger populations’ he says. ‘Even at the leadership level, there’s an increasing awareness that we aren’t dealing with small-time guys, and it’s now time to demonstrate that we mean serious business.’
Sayal, though, says that in Corbett, at least, he’s never heard of any poaching incidents. Instead, he says that the battle here is between the tigers and locals for the right to survive. ‘People near the reserve are dependent on their cattle,’ Sayal says. ‘If local cattle are hunted, villagers poison the meat so that the tiger dies. We need to understand that human-inflicted death of the tiger is often to protect livelihoods.’
He believes that government schemes therefore need to be focused on spreading awareness amongst stakeholders and should not waste crores of rupees on broad public campaigns. He points to the recently launched and high-profile Save Our Tigers public awareness initiative by a corporate telecom company—with its messages plastered around billboards and in newspapers—as a prime example of a misguided emphasis on urban centres.
‘[Effective] tiger conservation is led more by NGOs, who have done excellent work,’ he says. ‘Some have even distributed LPG cylinders to villagers so they don’t need to rely on driftwood and forest resources.’
Sayal had particular praise for the Corbett Foundation, which he says has followed a ‘holistic’ approach that includes immediately compensating each human death due to wildlife with Rs. 50,000 to try to ensure locals do not try to take revenge on tigers or leopards.
Dr. K. Sankar, a professor and research coordinator at the Wildlife Institute of India, says India faces some critical policy decisions if it is to ensure the tiger’s long-term survival.
‘The situation is under control now as far as poaching is concerned,’ Sankar says. ‘But we need to urgently create inviolate space for tigers by relocating villages from the tiger reserves, restoring forest connectivity between tiger occupied landscapes and through effective forest protection.’
Sankar says there’s been some success in re-introducing tigers in areas like Sariska and Panna, but he suggests there is still much that we don’t know about tigers in the wild. ‘Radio-collaring studies should be encouraged in tiger reserves to understand their movement, ranging patterns, food habits and tiger-human conflicts,’ he says.
Since the demise of the south China tigers—experts reckon there are only about 20 left in the wild now—India has been left with the largest tiger population in the world. The species very survival depends on it now taking a lead.
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