Fifty Years of Project Tiger; awaiting, Project Tiger Part Two!!

 

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"The most magnificent creature in the entire world the tiger is. “… Jack Hanna

The impact of an attacking tiger can be compared to that of a piano falling on you from a second story window. But unlike the piano, the tiger is designed to do this, and the impact is only the beginning."... John Vaillant

Jack Bushnell Hanna is a retired American zookeeper and a former director emeritus of the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium. "Jungle Jack" was director of the zoo from 1978 to 1992, and is viewed as largely responsible for elevating its quality and reputation. John Vaillant is an American-Canadian writer and journalist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Outside. Of-late my readers must be thinking I am obsessed with the tigers & I will not blame them but fact is I am obsessed with the forests (read as Indian Forests) & if you are obsessed with Bar (Permit Room) then how can you keep away a Devdas i.e., man most addicted to liquor, or say if you are obsessed with Vegas (Read as Gambling House) then how can you keep away from the greatest gambler! I know its worst joke or analogy but then the Great Ab i.e., Amitabh Bachchan also has done this type of analogy in his superhit movie Sharabi (Gehu ko Gehu nahi to kya jawari kahoge, sharabi ko sharbi nahi to kya pujari kahoge!) & please don’t ask me to translate this, it's worse than mine, lol, so be it! Well, in the nutshell, if you love to be in the Indian forests then you can’t keep away tigers is simple outcome & it’s with due respect to all other species which I love equally & like to be in their habitat & where tiger isn’t seen, for e.g. grasslands or some parts of western ghats where you can’t see a tiger but come across loads of other species & many such places where wildlife exists without a tiger, yet nobody can deny the importance of the tiger! And as I have repeatedly put forward, when you make a tiger able to survive on its own, you are indirectly making an ecosystem survive, that is the way I look at the tiger!

Now about the subject, as many of you must be knowing the term Project Tiger but many more do not know what it stands for except it is something related to the tigers & that is enough for them. Or few more countrymen may be aware that our National Animal is a tiger & I will not blame them, as in a country where day to day survival is a problem for most of the humans, who cares about what is project Tiger which must be govt’s some mission for our national animal, that’s all! And this is why the success of Project Tiger is more bright as its easier for some mission to succeed when most of the citizens are aware about it, as then they support wholeheartedly to that mission but when nearly 90% of the citizens (this too I am liberal a lot) doesn’t know (or doesn’t care) about the object of your mission & then you succeed, that is not a joke or a fluke & for that I must congratulate entire system which is involved in Project Tiger (mainly respective forest depts) for taking on this challenge! And the outcome is, the numbers of tigers which supposedly went down to below four digits (below 1000 mark) & the future for our National Animal was darker than we can imagine (read as extinct) at such time it helped to protect the tigers of our country & helped in the increase of their population too! But then the Hon PM (who else), Smt Indira Gandhi with guidance of few big names in wildlife Dr. Karan singh, Belinda Wright, Bittu Sahegal, & more such stepped in & Project Tiger materialized, this was in 1973, fifty years back!  Project Tiger is a concept by which habitats of the tigers are identified & a conservation scheme under law & protection of concerned agencies was planned. This included the formation of NTCA i.e., National Tiger Conservation Authority which was supposed to monitor the project Tiger as well declaration of Tiger Parks or reserved Forests with the concept of Core & Buffers around the core was introduced for the first time! In a nutshell, the draft was something as below…

In the stage one various tiger reserves were created in the country based on the 'core-buffer' strategy, means an area marked as core where no human intervention will be allowed, giving total control to forest dept which will ensure safety of the tigers i.e. core & outside of this to give protection to the core area , buffer zone was created where limited activities were permitted for survival of the human settlements here! :

Core area: the core areas are free of all human activities. It has the legal status of a national park or wildlife sanctuary. It is kept free of biotic disturbances and forestry operations like a collection of minor forest produce, grazing, and other human disturbances are not allowed within. This included shifting of villages in the core area also & that was challenging part as these peoples used to stay here for centuries & asking them to shift hundreds of miles away was not an easy job!

Buffer areas: the buffer areas are subjected to 'conservation-oriented land use'. They comprise forest and non-forest land. It is a multi-purpose use area with twin objectives of providing habitat supplement to spillover population of wild animals from the core conservation unit and providing site-specific co-developmental inputs to surrounding villages for relieving their impact on the core area. Though this looked simple actually managing buffet is a bigger challenge as in core area the forest dept has total control on any activity while in buffer with co-existence of humans & wild animals, the conflicts was bound to happen & to failure in balancing these conflicts means defeat of the very purpose of Project Tiger!

To achieve above targets following means were decided for action plan:

Stepped-up protection/networking surveillance.

Voluntary relocation of people from core/critical tiger habitat to provide inviolate space for tiger.

Use of information technology in wildlife crime prevention.

Addressing human-wildlife conflicts.

Capacity building of frontier personnel.

Developing a national repository of camera trap tiger photographs with IDs.

Strengthening the regional offices of the NTCA.

Declaring and consolidating new tiger reserves.

Foresting awareness for eliciting new tiger reserves.

Foresting Research.

For each tiger reserve, management plans were drawn up based on the all these aspects.

(part of above info I have taken from Wikipedia website, a thing I rarely does but as Project Tiger is complex & technical subject too, so just didn’t want to use wrong terminology in explain the same.)

With all such planning & team of dedicated people & tremendous efforts of the system (read as govt depts & NGO’s) today we can say that Project Tiger is one of the most successful initiatives (or mission) undertaken by any country for conservation of one specie that too apex specie such as a tiger & not only saved the specie from getting instinct but saved thousands of others species along with it! And this success can be measured in the figures also as some fifty years back if the population of the tigers was below 1000 then today its nearly 3750 & these figures are a fact! This aspect of Project Tiger, unfortunately our govt (read as all the govts) has either not realized their own success or hasn’t considered it as that important on the background of many other pinching problems to the humans as humans are their voters, tigers are not! Yet we should not & shall not ignore the success of Project Tiger, if (this "if" is very important) we want to repeat that success in future also as the challenges ahead are different!

Because, later (read as a decade back) two more aspects came in to the picture i.e., wildlife tourism which I am sure (just guessing) was not considered when Project Tiger was planned & other aspect wasn’t considered, is the speed with which human’s population increased (read as, exploded). The first aspect is boon for Project Tiger (its humans vs humans conflict issue actually) which many NGO’s & wild lifers (so called) won’t agree with & even forest dept. officials are divided on this aspect, yet I am of the strong opinion that wildlife tourism (well managed) is the only hope or weapon to counterbalance the second un-considered factor in Project Tiger i.e., human’s population! As you can shift the villages in core area by power or law but what about an ever-increasing population in buffer areas & then buffers are also over-flowing with the tigers in habitats like Tadoba which is the success of project tiger, so where are we going to make the space available for these tigers!

This is my focus of sharing, where I want to appeal to the Hon PM (Present PM & the entire system) that now it’s a high time for the sequel of Project Tiger with changed dimensions of the present scenario on the wildlife front! In the first part of Project Tiger, we made the tigers survive & protected them from getting extinct. Those who know a bit about wildlife will understand that when you want to make a tiger survive in the wild then you must make its entire world survive which includes forest, water bodies, other animals & a complete wildlife cycle. But then another problem is with some land reserved for this purpose (core & buffer forests) you have made some tigers survive, what about the new tigers which will be generation next, where is the space for these tigers. As tigers are not community living animals & each tiger needs its own individual space, this is the challenge which is why now there is a need for Project Tigers part 2! Because if a tigress in her life span of 14-15 years (in the wilds, life of tiger is always less) conceive for say four times & with two cubs per pregnancy, she will give birth to approx. eight cubs & all of them will need their own forest area (territory) when they grow up or they will kill each other or will enter human towns & cities & outcome will be most of the tigers will die in this process. This is exactly happening around most successful Project Tiger habitats such as Tadoba as tigers are increasing but the forest they need isn’t increasing in the same proportion!

And trust me this challenge is more difficult as on one side we are unable to provide enough (read as liveable) homes to the humans & on such background we are now needed to find homes (read as forest) for the tigers along with other species which makes its home complete! If you feel I am over exaggerating (as usual) then in this very month of April while we are celebrating 50^th year of Project Tiger, there is a news of govt itself accepting reduction in forest cover in last five years & another news was, death of a leopard right in the vicinity of Tadoba in a road-kill by a truck carrying steel & for 30 minutes the animal was alive after accident but could not get help in time & died! This is the challenge, as if fifty years back Project Tiger’s needed to be created due to rampant killing of the tigers then today, all around the country we are killing tiger’s homes & this time, we need to protect not just the tiger but its entire home, i.e., the forests! And for that just urban planning won’t be sufficient as urban development is going too fast if we don’t make provision with authority & infrastructure (money & man power) to the forest dept the new tigers will be dead & so will be existing ones in the territorial fights! And this is possible only via a tool like Project Tiger, Phase 2, where the system (forest dept mainly) gets enough funds as well power for the mission. And we have the biggest weapon at hand & that is, wildlife tourism, which is a win-win situation for everybody associated with tigers & without conflicts. Tigers need their space, so does humans, if Project Tiger’s first phase was to seclude the tigers (just like quarantine in hospitals or quarantine centres, away from home) the phase two shall be co-existence (just like home quarantine) as this way humans will earn via existence of the tigers among them & this aspect Hon Courts, Hon NGO’s, Hon Environmentalists all should understand sincerely is a request. Forest dept also (those who are not for wildlife tourism), must think & pursue this to all concerned but for that it needs more man-power to tackle the humans & not animals! As at present forest dept don’t like wildlife tourism because it has already less on all the fronts & in such situation added responsibility of tourists (that too Indian tourists, lol, no offence dear fellow countrymen) is definitely something forest dept don’t want to have! But with strengthened infrastructure I am sure forest depts also will like to see that humans & tigers live together, because time is already running out, as we have lost nearly 150 plus tigers in last year & hardly 15 % of them have died by natural death!

Hon PM Sir, this needs to be done fast as more than year 1973, the need of Project Tiger Part 2 is now, i.e., in 2023 & this time the mission should not be necessarily seclusion of the tigers but it should be “Togetherness with the Tigers”, as then only we will be able to make the tigers survive in the future!

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Sanjay Deshpande 

Sanjeevani Dev.

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