It’s just over 20 years now. In August of 2005, we handed over the Tiger Task Force report to the then prime minister, Manmohan Singh. His government had asked me to chair this committee and draw up an agenda for the conservation of this flagship species. This came on the heels of an investigation by intrepid journalist Joydev Majumdar, who had broken the story that the last tiger had disappeared from Sariska National Park in Rajasthan. The government, faced with public outrage, did not do the usual—deny, obfuscate or set up a closed committee to produce recommendations that would invariably be buried. Instead, the committee comprised stellar conservationists and scientists with expertise, independence and divergent views, like the late Madhav Gadgil, Valmik Thapar and H S Panwar, and retired bureaucrat Samar Singh. I still do not know why I was asked to chair this group of greats, but I was certainly in the hot seat. There was immense attention on this scandal of the last tiger. I was roundly criticised as not being a “tiger” person—my work was to find a balance between the habitats of humans and wild animals.
We did not let any of this deter us; we had just three months to find solutions. Our first stop was Sariska, where much of what was ailing conservation came to light. First was the question of how tigers were being counted. For quite some years, tiger numbers had been declining but not in official records. Pugmark method, developed decades ago by experts like Panwar, was scientific and reliable; it involved taking casts of tiger pugmarks as a unique fingerprint. But over time, the method had been abused; pugmarks were being double-counted or even manufactured. Wildlife scientists had alternative methods of conducting a tiger census, but these had not been accepted for years, partly be-cause of a lack of consensus and partly because of apathy. It took intense consultations before the method of spatial survey combined with camera traps and physical counts was accepted. Remarkable scientists at the Wildlife Institute of India, Y V Jhala and Qamar Qureshi, ensured that the census became a rigorous and credible system, so that we would not miss another crisis.
Then there was the basic question of the state of tiger protection. At Sariska, we found compounding problems, from a lack of systems for recording what was happening on the ground to the ageing frontline guards to their poor working conditions and, of course, inadequate budgets. We recommended upgrading Project Tiger into a full-fledged authority with powers and new administrative systems for oversight. A forest-er and committed tiger expert, Rajesh Gopal, shaped this agenda and took it forward. The Wildlife Crime Control Bureau was set up to fight poaching and investigate international smuggling routes.
We need a strong co-existence agenda that safeguards rising tiger numbers while securing the livelihoods of local people
We then worked on securing enhanced budgets; even recommended that the tourist entry fees be used for improving conditions of guards and communities. The question of the people who lived in the tiger habitats was the most difficult. I was told by wildlife conservationists that people and tigers could not co-exist, and that these villages in tiger habitats had to go. “What were the numbers?” I asked. Nobody had an answer. After much persistence, it emerged that in the preceding 30 years, the government had relocated some 80 villages across tiger reserves and that 1,500 villages were still to go. The track record of this so-called “relocation” was so pathetic that when we spoke to village residents in Ranthambore Tiger Reserve, they told us they would prefer to be harassed by a forester, or even mauled by a tiger, than to live in resettled villages. There, they said, was no livelihood, no food, no water, and not even security of tenure.
Our recommendation was thus to prioritise relocation from villages inside the “core”—sanctum of tiger reserves. This alone meant 300 villag-es and over 100,000 people. We also asked for a better relocation package, to make it attractive for people to leave their homes and build new opportunities. This still left massive numbers of people living in proximity to tigers, which was neither good for them nor for conservation. The cartography of India showed this clearly—the lands of forests, water and tigers were also where some of the poorest people in India lived. It was clear that without helping to build the livelihoods of people living in conservation areas, there would be a low-intensity war of attrition. We suggested an agenda that was not well received: creating economic opportunities for communities through tourism and providing them with special funds for living in this ecosystem. This is the unfinished agenda.
As a result of our work and that of innumerable officials and governments, the number of tigers has increased in India. But this increase has largely been within the “enclaves” of the reserves. The real work now is to build a conservation programme that secures tigers and people. We need a strong co-existence agenda that safeguards rising tiger numbers while securing the livelihoods of local people.