The tiger roars again

India has more tigers, but habitats are deteriorating

Once upon a time, and not too long back, the rage of the tiger lover was louder than the roar of all of India’s tigers. Tiger lovers like Valmik Thapar and Sunita Narain roared against each other trying to prove to the country’s bewildered prime minister that each was more worried about the threat to India’s tiger population than the other! Both stepped in with ideas and the government implemented many of them. All of this seems to have helped tigers become more secure and fertile. India’s tiger population is up.

The 2010 tiger census points to a robust rebound in the tiger population, which is reckoned to have risen to around 1,706, from 1,411 in 2006, when the last census was carried out. A resurgence of this order in tiger numbers in a short span of less than five years is a matter for celebration. However, this good news comes with the worrying finding that not only is the improvement in numbers very unevenly distributed across the country, but that some of India’s tiger habitats are in a serious state of disrepair.

While the tiger tally has remained stable in many parts of the country, which is how it should be, it has risen too fast in some pockets, raising questions about the habitat and ecosystem’s ability to sustain the growth in numbers. On the other hand, numbers continue to go down in some states where the habitat has the potential to sustain larger numbers of these wild cats. In the latter category come parts of Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh, which have reported a decline in the tiger count since 2006. On the other hand, the tiger population has risen sharply in habitats like Corbett, Ranthambore, Bandhavgarh, Bor and Tadoba, which can be troublesome, as large numbers of people inhabit their peripheral buffer zones frequented by tigers. This makes it difficult to prevent man-animal encounters, in which the animals invariably are the losers.

A worrying fact revealed by the tiger census is the shrinkage of total tiger habitat by nearly 20,800 square km, or 12 per cent, even as the tiger count has swelled by 16 per cent. This implies that more wild cats are now roaming in a smaller area. Tigers are territorial animals that dislike sharing their command areas with others. A fight for turf among tigers and between tigers and others, including the human population, should be expected. This will force out-migration from core reserves to other surrounding areas, which are normally designated as multi-use forests, in search of prey and new territories. Such a trend has already begun to emerge and has even been borne out by the census findings, which reveal that nearly 30 per cent of the big cats are now found in areas surrounding the core territories of the reserves. Apart from the increased density of the tiger population and shrinkage of the overall habitat, the degradation of vegetative cover of the reserved forests and their adjoining tiger corridors is also now evident. Measures to conserve and further augment the vegetation of these reserves are essential to enable them to support an adequate herbivorous prey population. This is where the management of most tiger reserves has thus far been found wanting. The recent reversal in population trends does not mean the battle to protect the tiger has been finally won.