Give the tiger its corridors

The battle for tiger conservation must move to the corridors that link the big cats' habitat

“We had reached a point in time when there were more tiger experts in the country than tigers,” says Rajesh Gopal. “Now we are nearing the carrying capacity of our tiger reserves.” Gopal should know. He recently retired as the member-secretary of the National Tiger Conservation Authority — the apex government body in charge of creating space for tigers to co-exist in a densely populated country.

Starting from the crisis in 2005, when India discovered that tigers had been wiped out from Sariska in Rajasthan, Gopal has overseen the recovery of tiger numbers across the country. The latest estimate has shown that today there are 1,945-2,491 tigers in India. Their population is 30 per cent higher than it was the last time they were counted in 2010.

While some experts dispute the method by which tigers are counted in the country, the battle for their conservation might be shifting decisively. “The real challenge for tiger conservation lies outside the tiger reserves, in the corridors,” Gopal says. He is not talking of the corridors of power in Delhi that tiger experts and tiger lovers have always occupied. He is referring to the areas which link tiger reserves — the stretches that tigers use to move between good forest patches.

Tigers enjoy their territory-grabbing instincts. A good territory for a tiger, quite expectedly, is a place where it can find adequate food (prey) and procreate in relative peace. Finding such a patch is getting harder for the tiger with development turning its landscape into a patchwork of power lines, roads, irrigation canals, pipelines, villages and cities, with a few islands of dense or good forests interspersed among these as the sanctuary the tiger seeks. In this criss-cross maze, the tiger often seeks out a relatively more comfortable path to reach these forest patches to make its home. These paths are referred to as corridors by wildlife experts. At one level, one can imagine these corridors as pathways that ensure the gene flow of the species so that it does not wither away and also so that its population does not collapse within an isolated forest patch.

A corridor could be a small patch decently well-stocked or a not-so-good forest connecting two tiger reserves. It could be a dry or near-dry river bed; it could be a ravine; or it could be a patch of sugarcane fields and habitations. Or, for some tigers, it could be a route comprising all these, cutting through several districts and states. It’s when the tiger is crossing through these corridors that the media usually awakens to what it dubs “tiger gone astray”.

At a time when the tiger reserves — which have a legally much better protected status, at least on paper — themselves are under threat of being moth-eaten by development projects, the possibility that the corridors could turn into stretches that tigers just cannot pass through is increasing by the day.

Take the example of the central Indian forest patches that the tigers have relatively thrived in. One of the tiger reserves — Panna — faces the threat of losing a good part of its core area to the National Democratic Alliance government’s first river-linking project. The areas surrounding the reserve, which form the corridors, are already hemmed in by coal mining and other development activities such as highways. Records of the environment ministry show that most of these projects eventually get cleared, turning the few islands of healthy forests that are left into even smaller isolated patches.

Conserving these corridors is a political challenge in a country where the least empowered and the poorest people, many of them tribals, live on the periphery of or inside the forests. These are people who have gained little from economic development. The oversimplified narrative of tiger protection often played in the media pitches these people against the tiger conservation efforts. Their need for equal development and economic rights is seen in conflict with the safety of the tiger. This binary argument keeps the tiger-loving middle-income families concerned, without being responsible. And the tiger becomes an aesthetic notion that appropriates forests for only one use — tiger sighting.

But this argument, which has been cultivated for decades, does not work for tiger conservation as a whole. The corridors are not to be turned into dense forests. They are to
be kept simply in the shape and health to permit the tiger to pass through. It requires the people to live with the tiger. It requires all — the poor, the development projects and the tiger-happy naturalist — to cohabit on more even terms.

Scientifically, these corridors have been demarcated at a macro-scale. The states have been asked to also delineate these in greater detail. This is the easiest bit. Finding a management system that works to maintain the health of the corridors, continues to provide development space for the poor in and around the corridors and yet keeps polluting industries and other detrimental activities at bay is tough. No country has done it till now.

Gopal, in his book, Dynamics of Tiger Management in Priority Landscapes, says that the corridors add up to about 19,400 square kilometres of land. While scientifically these corridors can be delineated, legally there exists no such concept, unlike, say, in the case of a national parks, sanctuaries or tiger reserves. The wildlife protection law, which was amended in 2006 to provide additional protection for tiger-bearing areas, missed on this count.

This had substantially to do with the fact that the people who live in tiger-bearing areas often fear that any additional wildlife protection is bound to come at costs that only they would bear. This creates political pressure to not ring-fence any new areas for tigers, even if the ring is relatively porous — as it is meant to be for the corridors. The forest bureaucracy is more antagonistic in general to the local poor than to the ingress of larger economic and industrial interests into tiger or forest areas.

For now, the government has cut funding for tiger conservation in the Budget by approximately 16 per cent from last year’s revised estimate of Rs 161 crore.

“The best we can expect is to add another 300-500 tigers if we beef up the health of our tiger reserves,” says Gopal. “But as the corridors collapse, the numbers will not matter. The tiger populations will find it hard to survive,” he sums up.