Not just tigers

The crisis provoked by India's disappearing tigers has been unravelling for several weeks. It is now clear that the whole paraphernalia of reserve areas, forest staff and a special Project Tiger team has not been able to prevent the large-scale killing of tigers by poachers, so much so that tigers have disappeared altogether from the Sariska area in Rajasthan and have sharply dwindled in number in other places.

Following the surfacing of the scandal, it has also become known that officials have been routinely over-reporting the tiger population at the various reserve parks""so they were not unaware of the problem, and consciously sought to mask it over the years by falsifying the statistics.

Several points emerge from this. The first and most important is that this is another manifestation of how low Indian officialdom has sunk in its commitment to its work and to ensuring the desired end-result; in its ability to run a self-correcting system that addresses problems as they arise and work out correctives; in its proneness to corruption (were the poachers in league with officials?) and in its willingness to even report the facts of the case to those higher up the ladder.

At all levels, across several states, the story is of gross and even grotesque failure and of subsequent cover-up. It is difficult to see how a system as defective as this can be part of any solution; if those charged with guarding tigers now say there are no tigers left to guard, why should they hold down their jobs?

The second point is about the whole man-nature relationship, and how it should be defined. It might be argued, for instance, that the very conception of Project Tiger was flawed, in that it sought to keep people away from natural resources while ring-fencing specific areas for endangered species.

Everyone knows that this ring-fencing has been ineffective, and that forest guards routinely take bribes for allowing headloads of wood to be taken out of the reserved areas by villagers looking for free cooking fuel.

The same story goes with regard to grazing cattle, cutting grass and accessing forest produce. If this is reality, can the ring-fencing be made foolproof or is another model available for the man-nature relationship?

The third point is about criminality itself. The tigers have not disappeared because angry villagers wanted to grab natural resources for themselves (recall the Rajasthan chief minister's riposte to the Prime Minister that in a choice between giving water to birds of Koeladeo and people, she would choose people).

Rather, organised gangs of poachers have been allowed to be active across the country, with linkages to the main metropolises and cargo points. It is inconceivable that the police do not know how and where these gangs operate, and are unaware of the supply chain for tiger skins.

So the crisis of governance stretches to other wings of the administration. In the ultimate analysis, therefore, the issue is not tigers, for their disappearance is a manifestation of the much larger problem of dysfunctional government.

If that issue is not tackled, "malfeasance, misfeasance and nonfeasance" (to quote a line from the movies) will surface in yet more disturbing ways as time goes by.