"India's tiger claims are faulty"
K ULLAS KARANTH EMERITUS DIRECTOR, CENTRE FOR WILDLIFE STUDIES
India's tiger bureaucracy recently claimed that the country has attained a wild tiger population of about 3,000 and that their population should now be capped at 3,5004,000. Both claims are scientifically faulty.
The tiger bureaucracy 1,800 tigers in the early 1970s and this number rose steadily to 3,600 by 2002, before suddenly crashing to 1,400 by 2006. The crash happened because in 2005, a taskforce appointed by the then Prime Minister replaced the widely followed practice of using pugmarks to count tiger numbers with a new national tiger estimation (NTE) process. The country has stuck with NTE despite several criticisms. Using it, the tiger bureaucracy had cleverly "reset" the base tiger numbers from 3,600 in 2002 to an improbable low of 1,400 in 2006, thus setting the stage for claims of successes in subsequent years. At the same time, instead of making the raw data available for public scrutiny, the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) now only releases glossy summary reports every four years.
India's current reserves cover only 20 per cent of the 380,000 sq km of forests that can support tigers. The wild animal's population is at very low densities in the forests of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and the northeastern states. So, the country has a carrying capacity of 10,000 to 15,000 tigers.
The present compassionate but unscientific solutions to emergent conflicts, such as feeding and rescuing incapacitated wild tigers, artificially enriching tiger habitats, and above all, translocating "problem" tigers, should be abandoned. Only then can we attain the important goal of rewilding viable populations of our national animal across its former range.
"Tigers are a wise investment"
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