Tiger, tiger burning dim in the Indian wild

LETTER FROM NEW DELHI
BY NIRMAL GHOSH
INDIA CORRESPONDENT

IF THE recent scandal-shrouded deaths of tigers in zoos, of disease and at the hands of people, have had a salutary effect at all, it has been to spark brief media interest in the tiger.

Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, from his recovery bed in a Mumbai hospital, was moved at the report of the tigress Saki being killed and skinned in Hyderabad Zoo. He fired off a memo requesting that it be investigated thoroughly.

Conservationists noted the irony: zoo tigers have little to do with conservation in the wild where it is most required, as they cannot be re-introduced into the wild.

Yet earlier in the year when the skin and body parts of dozens of tigers and hundreds of leopards were seized - indicating an alarming trend - the Prime Minister had done nothing.

And he is the chairman of the Indian Board For Wildlife, a body that decides policy, vets proposals impacting wildlife, and sets direction.

The only problem: the Board has not met since 1998 when former Prime Minister I. K. Gujral, under pressure from conservationists worldwide, called a meeting.

One of the upshots was an acceptance of the fact that the tiger is today in a critical position despite the successes of Project Tiger, a programme started in 1972.

India has about half the world's remaining 5,000-odd tigers.

As such the giant cat has its best chance of survival in India, where it exists in a fairly wide range of habitats from dry forest to the mangroves of the Sundarbans - the world's largest intact mangrove ecosystem.

The London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) stepped into the fray last week when it launched an Internet fax campaign directed at the Prime Minister to urge him to take serious steps towards saving the tiger and - equally if not more important - its habitat which accounts for some of India's last remaining viable forests.

The forests do not just support tigers and the complex pyramid of biodiversity below the cats in the food chain, but serve as watercatchment and flood regulation mechanisms crucial to the well-being and security of millions - a fact poorly-understood in a country in the process of embracing globalisation and free markets.

India has very little forest left - less than 14 per cent of its land mass - of which only some is protected.

With liberalisation, various lobbies such as mining, oil and road-building have been pressing for a rollback of protection laws in some areas so that they can be opened up.

They have quite often been successful.

And the pressures are not only in India; across the border in Bangladesh, Shell has plans to explore the Sundarbans for oil.

With one billion people, pressure on land in India is immense.

The country has, in fact, done well to have saved what it has in terms of wilderness ecosystems like forests and wetlands - though the latter are today disappearing at a faster rate than the forests.

And then there is poaching to supply tiger body parts to markets in China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan. These countries have banned trade in tiger parts, but as in any other rare but sought-after item, there is a thriving illegal trade.

For a few dollars, a tiger can be located and killed by a local poacher in India who supplies the animal to a city-based middleman who then arranges for it to be taken out of the country, usually through Tibet or Nepal.

It makes a big difference in India if the man at the top - the Prime Minister - takes an interest in an issue or simply sends out a signal to government departments and frontline agencies that an issue is to be taken seriously.

That is what conservationists are asking of the Indian Prime Minister.

According to Project Tiger director P. K. Sen, India has lost at least 100 tigers from the wild this year.

In neighbouring Nepal, the army secures its most important national parks - Chitwan, Bardia and Sukhla Phanta. If not for the army, the forest would have been nibbled away over the years, especially in Chitwanwhich which is under pressure from local villages on the periphery.

Former Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv were personally interested in wildlife. Indira Gandhi would often take a break in Dachigam National Park, a few kilometers from Srinagar in Kashmir - a fabulously beautiful mountain wilderness.

It made a difference; the Board used to meet regularly in those days.

But in the decade of the 1990s, the seriousness has almost vanished.

Everywhere outside India, tigers - a symbol of Asia for centuries and a precious part of almost all Asian cultures - are hanging by a thread.

They are likely to survive longer in India, but at the rate things are going, not for much longer. Many tiger populations are small and restricted to small patches of forest; organised poaching gangs can wipe out smaller populations in a matter of weeks.

I have tracked personally many tigers, on foot, from jeeps and on elephant back, through the jungles of India. I gauge the health of a forest by the number of tiger and leopard pugmarks that I can see on the dusty river beds and jungle tracks.

I have shivered under a full moon on a winter night out in the forest, listening to the roars of a tiger as it crosses the valley in front of me, out of sight but its very presence transfixing the night.

And I have come to recognise the feeling of something missing when I don't see any pugmarks or hear no tigers; for some reason the forest seems more silent than usual. It is as if its spirit is missing.

Awareness of the critical situation facing the tiger is spreading worldwide.

Recently one million Indian schoolchildren signed a scroll to support preserving the tiger.

Some 8,000 children turned out on the seafront at Mumbai at a ceremony to present it, and Prime Minister Vajpayee sent a message saying the country was committed to saving the tiger.

But conservationists believe the message should be directed to the system, to empower those agencies andpeople whose job it is to save the tiger. Only then perhaps will the forests not fall silent.