An international conference commemorating 50 years of Project Tiger in India was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on April 9, 2023, at Mysuru. During the event, the PM released the latest report cards on the management effectiveness of 52 Tiger Reserves (TRs) and the interim report on the all-India tiger estimation exercise.
One of the major highlights of the conference was the launch of the International Big Cat Alliance aimed at protecting seven species globally: the tiger, leopard, jaguar, lion, snow leopard, puma, and cheetah, worldwide. The PM attributed the increasing number of tigers, Asiatic lions, leopards, rhinoceroses, and elephants, as well as the addition of tree cover and biodiversity, to the tradition and culture of India. He added that the ‘Amrit Kaal Ka Vision” for the next 25 years will focus on a landscape-level approach to secure wild tiger habitats and their role in livelihood and preserving socio-cultural ethos. He advised member countries of the Big Cat Alliance to find relationships of emotion and economy between wild animals and the communities residing around them. India is playing the role of Vishwaguru in biodiversity conservation.
Project Tiger, with nine sites extending over 16,338 sq km, was launched in India by former PM Indira Gandhi on April 1, 1973. The coverage has steadily increased, and now 53 TRs are notified in the country, covering a total area of 75,000 sq km. The fifty-year journey of Project Tiger is divided into two phases.
The first phase went through turbulence when, in the 1980s, the trade in body parts of tigers began to decimate the population, leading to the shocking revelation of the local extinction of tigers in 2005 in Sariska (Rajasthan) and later in Panna (Madhya Pradesh), Buxa (West Bengal), and the TRs of the north-eastern states. A tiger task force was constituted, and based on its recommendation, a chapter on the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) was inserted in the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, on September 26, 2006. This led to the second part of the journey with a specific tiger agenda, such as notification of core and buffer areas, critical tiger habitats, managing reserves with an NTCA-approved tiger conservation plan, relocation of villages from core areas, and settling inter-departmental coordination issues through a steering committee headed by the chief minister of the respective state.
While NTCA regularly worked on implementation, TR-level management in some of the states lagged behind. No doubt, states have secured tigers in different landscapes but neglected habitat and corridor conservation. Implementation of the Forest Rights Act, 2006, has been flawed. Politicians supported the bogus claims for electoral gains. This has been one of the main reasons for decimating tree growth on forest land; it is corroborated by the India State Forest Report (ISFR 2021), the latest in the series published every alternate year by the Forest Survey of India.
The assessment of forest and tree cover in notified TRs was also studied. Decadal change between 2011 and 2021 in tree cover in 52 TRs has been analysed in ISFR 2021, and it is found that there is a total loss of tree cover to the extent of 22.62 sq km. While 20 TRs have gained tree cover, 32 have lost it. TRs like Buxa (West Bengal), Anamalai (Tamil Nadu), and Indravathi (Chhattisgarh) have gained 238.80 sq km, 120.78 sq km, and 64.48 sq km, respectively, while TRs like Kawal (Telangana), Bhadra (Karnataka), and Sundarbans (West Bengal) have lost cover in 118.97 sq km, 53.09 sq km, and 49.95 sq km, respectively. The story from Karnataka is quite disturbing. Apart from Bhadra, the TRs like Nagarhole, Bandipur, and Kali have also lost 42.38 sq km, 7.39 sq km, and 13.14 sq km, respectively. The only TR in Karnataka that has gained 16.77 sq km of tree cover is BRT.
The interim report of all India tiger estimation for the Western Ghats landscape reads, “The majority of tiger populations remain stable, and some have declined; a significant reduction of tiger occupancy has been observed throughout the landscape.” The observation in the central Indian Highlands and Eastern Ghats landscape has shown gains in number but pointed out threats to conservation like high concentrations of mining activity. Tiger occupancy declined in Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, and Telangana. The report from the north-eastern landscape is equally shocking: “The landscape has experienced extensive change in land-use patterns in the past, leading to severe loss of natural habitat.”
Overall, the report indicates that the number of tigers has gone up from 2,967 to at least 3,167; the loss in the Western Ghats landscape has been wiped out by the gains in the central Indian landscape. We must reverse the trend of decimating forest cover to restore habitats and corridors for tigers.
(The writer is a retired principal chief conservator of forests, Karnataka)