Call of the wild

National Park tourism must evolve beyond the tiger

The 33 per cent bump in the tiger  population according to the latest census reflects a triumph of India’s conservation efforts and its ability to conduct a complex exercise, possibly the world’s largest, in counting carnivores. These are remarkable achievements: India not only has the world’s largest tiger population but has managed this with the world’s second-largest population. Taken together with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s scheduled appearance on Discovery TV with Bear Grylls, this is an opportune time to propagate awareness and appreciation of India’s ecological bounty among the wider Indian populace. Mr Modi's appearance on Mr Grylls’ show may further this aim, though a programme that features man overcoming beasts in the wild may not be the most appropriate way to spread the good word. Many man-animal conflicts — the kind that results in the tragic killing of leopards, tigers, and elephants — are often a result of rank ignorance rather than livelihood encroachments. Few care to acknowledge, for instance, that people are not natural food for tigers; they kill humans only when threatened or lack prey. Leopards, to take another example, are one of the most adaptive of the big cats and tend to encroach on human habitat, especially those that are garbage-ridden when their natural habitat shrinks. This is what is happening in the Borivali National Park, for instance, where real-estate encroachments are impinging on the eco-system for leopards and other lesser mammals. As a result, they stray into newly urbanised areas, often killing unsuspecting humans who cross their path.

At least part of the trouble is the lack of awareness-building in India’s zoos and institutions, official and private, involved in wild-life tourism. The appalling behaviour of the Indian public at zoos is one reflection of this. Another is the mono-focus of tourists visiting National Parks. Every National Park promises the visitor a unique view of the tiger and builds up the mystique of the animal (some even invoke The Jungle Book, for good measure). In National Parks such as the ones in Ranthambhore, Corbett, or Kanha, this has created something of a circus-like atmosphere where jeeps and guides keep a laser-focus on the whereabouts of the big cats to the exclusion of all else. This is a great pity. For one, this single-minded mission of spotting a tiger in the wild raises unrealistic expectations. Unlike the vast open plains of Serengeti in Africa, where big cats and other animals can be viewed in their hundreds, tigers are an extraordinarily reclusive beast, and are unlikely to willingly reveal themselves even in the thinnest deciduous forests (this is one reason a tiger census is so challenging). Spotting the tiger then becomes a competitive exercise that appears to bring out the worst in the average Indian tourist — noise and litter are their hallmarks. What they miss in this single-minded quest are the multiple bounties embedded in Indian forests — trees, birds, insects, leaves, and flowers. As Pranay Lal’s encyclopaedic Indica (2016) has revealed, South Asia is home to a record number of species of flora and fauna and unique habitats. If National Park administrations and guides worked towards offering tourists a journey through nature and the environment, Indians would come away with a better appreciation of the raison d’etre of conservation.