© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Madhav National Park in Shivpuri district, Madhya Pradesh, was declared a tiger reserve earlier this month, taking the tally of such reserves in the country to 58.
The latest tiger reserve is spread over an area of 1,651 sq km, and currently has six tigers, including a cub. It is hoped that the notification of the new reserve will aid the movement of tigers in the Ranthambore-Kuno-Madhav National Park corridor, identified as a promising habitat for a growing tiger population.
Although native elites in India had been hunting big game for millennia, it was during British rule that this activity reached an unprecedented scale. Even after Independence, big game hunting flourished among Indian elites and tourists. For tigers, the apex predator of India’s forests, this had huge consequences.
An alarm about declining tiger populations (also courtesy rapid deforestation to carve out farm land) was sounded in the 1960s. In 1969, the Indira Gandhi-led Union government banned the export of tiger skins. The very same year, the landmark 10th assembly of the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Delhi saw tigers being recognised as an endangered species, and a resolution being adopted to put a moratorium on their killing. The government also launched a task force to address the issue, headed by the chairman of the Indian Board for Wildlife, Karan Singh.
The recommendations of this task force paved the way for the launch of Project Tiger in April 1973, soon after the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972, was passed. This project was meant to last only for six years initially, but has continued to date. It was aimed at maintaining a viable population of tigers, and preserving their habitat.
Project Tiger was launched with nine tiger reserves — Manas (Assam), Jim Corbett (now in Uttarakhand), Kanha (Madhya Pradesh), Palamau (now in Jharkhand), Ranthambore (Rajasthan), Simlipal (Odisha), Melghat (Maharashtra), Bandipur (Karnataka), and the Sundarbans (West Bengal).
These reserves were notified in areas where national parks already existed and were provided funding through a centrally sponsored scheme.
The purpose of the reserves was to create a “core” —where felling, grazing, and movement of people, except those involved in conservation activities, was prohibited — and a “buffer zone”, where human activity would be limited, ‘Joining the Dots’, the report of the 2005 tiger task force under Sunita Narain, noted.
After amendments to the Wildlife Protection Act in 2005-06, the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), a statutory body, was created for oversight on the implementation of Project Tiger.
India is home to an estimated 3,681 tigers (range 3167-3925), as per the last population estimation released in 2022-23. The big cats occupy around 89,000 sq km area, as per NTCA. That is equivalent to the area of Jordan, and larger than that of Austria. Tigers are broadly distributed across the following “landscapes” — Shivalik Hills and Gangetic Plains, Central Indian Highlands and Eastern Ghats, Western Ghats, North Eastern Hills and Brahmaputra floodplains, and the Sundarbans.
Corbett, with 260 tigers, boasts the largest population of the big cat followed by Bandipur (150), Nagarhole (141), Bandhavgarh (135), Dudhwa (135), Mudumalai (113), Kanha (105), Kaziranga (104), Sundarbans (100), Tadoba-Andhari (97), Sathyamangalam (85), and Pench (77).
Among states, Madhya Pradesh with 785 has the biggest tiger population, followed by 563 in Karnataka, 560 in Uttarakhand, and 444 in Maharashtra.
A recent study published in the journal Science said that between 2006 and 2018, the area occupied by tigers has gone up by 30%, and more interestingly, some six crore people lived in around 45% of the area occupied by tigers.
The study revealed that only 25% of the tiger habitats were in the core areas of tiger reserves, while buffer areas accounted for 20% of the big cat’s habitat.
Today, there are 26 tiger reserves with a population of more than 50 tigers.
In the remaining 27 reserves, there are concerns about the tiger density. In fact, there were some 16 reserves with either no tigers, or male-only populations, or fewer than five tigers, as per the 2022 report. These reserves were in Arunachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Telangana, and Odisha.
Of particular concern is the situation across Telangana, Odisha, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, where the tiger population has either remained static, declined, or even gone locally extinct, as is the case of the Satkosia reserve in Odisha.
The research published in Science had highlighted that poor socio-economic conditions, lack of political stability, insurgencies, the pressures of mining, development projects, and competition for forest resources had all contributed to this situation.
