Walking down the last trail ???

The last post that I wrote outlined my fascination for the King of the Indian forests, The Tiger,.Being a personal account it simmered more on my experiences, but now I would like to add another dimension to this angle.Lets come down to the more gruesome and gory details of of the our national pride, which seems to have eluded the minds of the protectors of our forests all these years.The more I loved the tiger, the more I learnt about it, and unhappily what I learnt left me quite stunned.
1411, that is the figure that has been glaring down at us from various billboards throughout our city.A mobile company's "save the tiger" campaign has been quite a hit, with celebrities galore putting their voice behind it.People are suddenly aware of our national animal's dimming fortunes, what with blogs and social networking sites going into a tizzy trying to fill up their pages with debates galore on what needs to be done to save the precious animal.The sudden rise in this awareness is a good thing, but the more prominent question that needs to be asked is that are the voices strong enough to bring our corrupt and inept netas from their slumber and finally force them to do something for the "dying" animal? I think not, for the simple reason that animals cant vote!!


Though the number 1411 has stuck with all and sundry, I would like to aware my readers that it is an old number, the census figure of the year 2005.Many more innocent tigers have been butchered since. Though am not an expert on the issue, from whatever I have gathered by reading various books of Indian conservationists, the number should be somewhere around a mere thousand.


Chimerical though it may seem, but there used to be a time , when it was a toss up between humans and tigers, and at the turn of the century we had close to about 40,000 tigers!!If the words of conservationists are taken fore, we have lost close to a 1500 tigers in the last six years alone. Caught in metal traps , they are shot at point blank range. The tiger is being butchered primarily to tailor Tibetan dresses and for making Chinese medicines. This is appalling and shameful .At a time when we, as Indians, should be nurturing our National pride, we are slowly peeling its skin off and selling it off to foreign lands.
Tiger killings go a long way back too. In the pre- independence days, the tiger was the ‘prized trophy’ for the Indian royalty. Shooting a tiger signaled the coming of age for young princes. Post – independence the carnage continued. Amidst this blatant and senseless butchery, alarm bells were signaled in the 1960s.The tiger was vanishing and fast. Then , the country found a saviour in the form of the then PM , Smt. Indira Gandhi .An ardent animal lover, under her watchful eyes began a crusade to protect the tiger, which took the official form of Project Tiger, the worlds biggest conservation initiative, launched in April 11, 1973, and with a lot of jamboree at that. And it continued for over three decades, but all the celebrations came to a screeching halt in 2004, after the news of the Sariska tiger wipeout. When the project had started, we had about 1500 tigers; three decades hence about a 1000 remain in the wild. Whether the project was successful or not, is anybody’s guess.




I think the time has come for us to realize some glaring loopholes that exist both at the centre and state levels, monitoring the survival of the tigers. Bandhavgarh has lost many tigers, Panna is facing a tiger drought as well. Dampha is beyond redemption, as is Buxa.Sightings in Dudhwa with over hundred ‘official’ tigers are low. Not a pugmark seen, not a single cattle kill- indications of a dwindling tiger population.The area around the Sunderbans has seen a seizure of skins and a number of seizures on the borders of Nepal and Tibet. There was a case in 2004, where a tiger skin was recovered from Assam, being carried, believe it or not, in a police car. Poaching is rampant.And we are not even talking of the other not so popular reserves like Manas, Indrawati,Nagarjunasagar, Palamau and Valmiki; all plagued by a severe tiger crisis.
Though the apocalypse appears sudden, it isn’t so actually. Tigers existed , but only in the imagination and files of park officials. The pugmark census method, has had always been skeptical. One fact though, is quite certain,most park directors conjure up imaginary tigers to show a higher population, it avoids unpleasantness, inquiries, keeps their jobs safe and creates a sense of false security. The CBI report on Sariska seconds that point, clearly stating that the census numbers were grossly inflated.Whatever the numbers might have been, ironically though, now there are none.


The most obvious culprit in this horrifying decline is obviously poaching. The other pervasive threat to the big cat is the steady decline of its habitats. India has lost over fifty per cent of its potential tiger habitats since its independence. The bigger misfortune though is that the government and Project Tiger refuse to recognize the current crisis even in the face of inescapable evidence.


So, is this the end of the road for the tiger? Is there absolutely no hope for its future? Possibly. But, primarily we need to inculcate in ourselves certain severe facts. In any strategy to save wild tigers we have to discuss the big cat’s future without confusing it with livelihood issues of forest dwellers. There is absolutely no connection between the two. Tigers cannot breed in coexistence with humans.If you force them to live with humans, man-animal conflicts increase dangerously, Livestock gets killed, man-eating is a possibility, tigers then get poisoned and then it doesn’t stop till the last tiger is wiped out. Simply put, tigers need inviolate spaces and so do the deer and the boar and the ‘gaur’, which are the prey of the tiger. It is these essential facts that must be understood by human right activists. It is then that the tiger population rise or are maintained at healthy levels. We must not forget that the Java, Bali, Caspian and now even the South Chinese Tiger became extinct because of excessive human interference in the tiger’s habitat, which resulted in sharp falls in the prey species and in the end triggered the tiger’s extinction. We must learn from them so that we do not repeat the mistakes, which would jeopardize the Indian tiger’s future.


There might be lots of possible solutions to cease this rapid decline in the tiger numbers, noted conservationists have pointed that out endlessly. But before that we need to to understand and digest that the future of the tiger is BLEAK.All of us as citizens need to be aware and raise our voices, because that is the only way to bring the Govt. into action.The media, both print and T.V., needs to do a lot more than to cover useless stories, and should devote much more time on this grave issue to make the Govt. and the citizens more aware of the situation at hand.Let’s get one thing straight, its quite certain that tribals and forest dwellers, armchair academics and human rights activists are not going to save tigers. A robust government and a cognizant society CAN. If the greed for tiger bones and fur does not cease, the king of beasts will forever live under the shadow of the gun.In the words of noted conservationist Valmik Thapar "Let us not loose our national heritage for want (or the lack of it) of collective effort and other petty issues. We have to keep the right foot forward and ensure that the memory of the Panthera Tigris doesn’t just remain in the pictures of books".Quite amply put that; you see its very easy to sit back and blame, but to walk on the right path is very difficult. Dark and difficult times lie ahead, and very soon we shall all have to face a choice, between whats right and what is easy.