Tiger biologist Ullas Karanth for science-based plan to lift big cat count to 10,000-15,000 (IANS Interview)

VISHAL GULATI

New Delhi, April 8 (IANS) India needs a clear vision and a science-based action plan to attain the goal of 10,000-15,000 tigers in the wild. The present wimpy goal of 3,500 tigers and all this self-congratulatory crowing about the mere one per cent growth rate in tiger numbers "we have achieved is the biggest grey area".

These are the views of Ullas Karanth, one of the world's best-known tiger biologists and Emeritus Director at the Centre for Wildlife Studies established in 1984.

Commenting on 50 years of India's Project Tiger, Karanth in a candid interview told IANS, "We have been growing the massive tiger bureaucracy, while under a serious mission drift for two decades. All the last four regimes at the Centre, starting in 2004 to the present day, are afflicted with the same problem.

"While other major changes, both social and economic, are noticeable in the development arena, wildlife conservation has remained moribund and bureaucratic."

Comparing across big cat species recovery programs in Asia, "the Project tiger scheme", which was in place between 1973-2004, should be considered a unique success.

However, its enabling law, the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972, was at the root of this success.

The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), which swallowed up Project Tiger after 2005, has been in "my opinion a failure, wasting enormous sums of money for very little gain, while also losing its original mission focus".

He told IANS the Prime Minister's Tiger Task Force established in 2005 to review the management of tiger reserves created a vast self-sustaining �central tiger bureaucracy' with no responsibility for implementation on the ground.

The official, government-monopoly tiger monitoring programs, either the old pugmark census between 1972-2004 or the NTCA's �National Tiger Estimation' (NTE) after 2005, both are carried out at four-year intervals.

"Both are poorly conceived and deeply flawed ecologically and statistically. The flaws in the NTE are by now well known, and have been seriously critiqued initially by me, but later also by many other competent scientists," said Bengaluru-based Karanth, a critic of the government's conservation policies and one who believes in rigorous tiger audits.

"Robust scientific alternatives have been offered. But the show goes on, only producing glossy reports bereft of data and analyses, which are released with great fanfare once in four years. Unfortunately, with all this noise of hype overwhelming signals of science, and total opacity in data collection, storage and analyses, the gullible media and public are swallowing it all as gospel truth."

India has over 70 per cent of the global wild tiger population. Union Minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change Bhupender Yadav has said the government demonstrated its commitment to tiger conservation by increasing the number of tiger reserves to 52 from the initial nine in 1973, the latest being Ramgarh Vishdhari in Rajasthan.

For Karanth, the poaching of tigers, and more importantly their prey species, was the key factor that drove the tiger to the brink of extinction by the early 1970s.

"Thanks to the hard work of the Indian foresters of that generation, supported by conservationists, and led by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, poaching was stemmed in many locations across India and tigers recovered at least in a few dozen reserves.

"Over the years, those high levels of poaching have dropped across most of south India, parts of central India and in the Terai regions from Corbett to Kaziranga. In the same areas, economic development has caused replacement of wild meat by domesticated animal meat on a large scale, further reducing subsistence poaching.

"However, the earlier widespread poaching, which wiped out tigers and prey still prevails in other parts of central and eastern India and the entire northeastern hill regions, where India's most extensive forests remain.

"These continue to be empty forests. If the widely promoted theory that stricter anti-poaching efforts are not needed and local people will protect tigers on their own were true, these forests should have been the ones teaming with tigers!"

On being asked about rigorously adopting camera trap sampling to monitor the tiger, he told IANS the pugmark census is mostly history now.

"However, while cameras are being bought in massive numbers and deployed widely, except for a few research projects much of this camera trapping is ad hoc and non-rigorous.

"Most of this official camera trapping does not follow rigorous capture-recapture model protocols, as is claimed, in terms of observing population closure and open periods of sampling, or even identifying individual animals with necessary rigour across space and time.

"Even worse is the attempt to come up with numbers for states and regions by integrating camera trap surveys with spoor surveys conducted at wider scales.

"These �index calibrations' are simply invalid as can be demonstrated from the government's own data. Most folks in the field, who work for state forest departments, blindly follow NTCA protocols, handover the data, and do not even know what goes on.

"Some are resorting to running default options on software they do not even understand. There is competition among states to claim more and more tigers, as was the case with pugmark census decades ago before it crashed."

Karanth, whose latest book is "Among Tigers: Fighting to Bring Back Asia's Big Cats", believes the tiger is an umbrella species.

"If large tracts of nature are protected in its name, many other species will automatically benefit. Using charismatic umbrella species, such as the tiger, elephant, rhino, snow leopard, wolf and the bustard, we can protect a lot of overall biodiversity."

"While a lot of money is being spent on tiger reserves, too much of it is going to the same old well-protected places, while the critical task of creating more viable new tiger habitats is ignored," he told IANS.

"This misallocation of funds also affects how all this money is being spent. Instead of concentrating on tightening protection and actively promoting relocation of willing families and villages to create more room for tigers, a lot of the money is being wasted on unnecessary habitat management measures and on duplicating rural development work under the label of eco-development.

"Some tiger reserves that can be adequately protected at Rs 3-4 crore per year are spending ten times that amount, while other critical tiger habitats that can be protected are neglected and starved of funds."

On the rise in the tiger population in India, he said their numbers have increased in some reserves, sometimes beyond natural levels because of excessive habitat enrichment.

These overall figures reported of an increase in tiger numbers are meaningless. "In 2006, when the present counting methodology was introduced, to get rid of the blame for the Sariska extinction earlier, �tiger numbers' were drastically reduced from 3,200 to 1,400 without any basis.

"This jugglery has allowed the bureaucracy to play the tiger numbers game for years to come. Even if we take the present figure of 3,000 as a reasonable guess, all it shows is that in the last 50 years we have added 1,000 tigers, an annual growth rate of one per cent or so: better than other Asian countries, but nowhere near the 10,000 tigers we should aspire for."

According to him, the emerging conflicts in high tiger density areas are the price "we pay for successful tiger recovery that need urgent redressals. Where there are no tigers as in Nagaland there is no conflict".

Expressing concern over poaching and retaliatory killing, tigers have been extinct in Nagaland for over 60 years.

This is because of local poaching and poor law enforcement (which is a social problem). Sometimes this is driven by international trade. "That is where special protection is needed. However, since the writ of the all-India services does not run on the ground there, how we can evolve more localized protection systems needs careful study."

"Let us not forget that in the first three decades of Project Tiger when spectacular gains were made, the effort was led primarily by pragmatic state forest department officers and staff. Even today, these locally rooted watchers, guards and rangers are the linchpins of tiger protection, not the layers of thick bureaucracy we have overlaid in recent years," Karanth added.

(Vishal Gulati can be contacted at [email protected])