Last and Final Call

Yes! We can still save the tiger, but will we? Bittu Sahgal and Jennifer Scarlott flag an issue that should be at the top of the agenda of the Indian Prime Minister and every other head of state, indeed the Security Council of the United Nations itself – the survival of the natural world, and, therefore, of Homo sapiens.

Why should you want? Behold, the earth hath roots; within this mile break forth a thousand springs…
William Shakespeare
Timon of Athens, Act IV, Scene iii

Morning in Ranthambhore. We had been watching flying foxes swoop low over the lake for some time when the tall grass at the water’s edge began to sway. Near our jeep, a young tigress, peaceful but alert these past 10 minutes, raised her head and turned it in the direction of the rustling grass, the white spot on the back of each ear daring us to shift in our seats. A large shape became discernible. As our tigress rose to her feet, a low growl emanated from the waving grass. Then, just four metres from where we sat, the grass parted, and another tigress appeared, a chital fawn dangling from her jaws. Continuing to growl dyspeptically, the chital-bearer came up the slope. She paused, muffled warnings issuing from around the deer’s neck. Making her decision, she moved a short distance to her left and sank to her haunches beneath an overhanging tree, prey still firmly clenched. Meanwhile, her hungry sister lowered herself delicately to the ground, elongating neck and head forward until her chin came to rest at the lowest possible point. From this meek posture, she observed the feast.

By the time you read this piece, both the young tigresses described will be on the search for new territories away from the famous lakes of Ranthambhore, around which their mother, carefully nurtured them over the past two years. The trouble is that there is little land available for new tigers. This is why serious efforts are on by the Rajasthan Forest Department to provide the tigers of Ranthambhore an ‘escape’ from the ecological cul de sac into which decades of deforestation around the tiger reserve has islanded them.

Sitting at Jogi Mahal across the waters of Padam Talao, we heard Parmesh Chandra, State Additional Chief Secretary, Rajasthan, say quite simply what his strategy was to remedy this situation: “Apart from physical protection, we plan to provide tigers with freer access to outlying areas that we have begun protecting more effectively, including the Sawai Mansingh, Sawai Madhopur, Keladevi, and Qualji Closed Area Sanctuaries. The corridors linking these forests with Ranthambhore are key to safeguarding the future of Rajasthan’s tigers.” We agreed unreservedly.

The empty forest syndrome

Meanwhile, a hop and disconnected step away from Ranthambhore, in Sariska, no tigers pad forests that once were the pride of Rajasthan and Project Tiger. The last one was killed sometime in 2004, thanks to a combination of determined international trading syndicates, unscrupulous villagers and a demotivated and directionless field staff. Moves are afoot now to translocate wild tigers back to Sariska (Sanctuary, Vol. XXVIII No. 2, April 2008), a move that Chief Wildlife Warden Ramesh Mehrotra suggests: “Not only does this have the requisite political support, but technical and financial support too. But this is still a very risky proposition that involves the shifting of villages, a national highway and placing curbs on an all-powerful temple board.” Clearly, the effort is worth making and should be supported by anyone who wants tigers to survive into the future. When he was alive, Rajesh Pilot, one of India’s more principled politicians whose home, Dausa, lay smack in the middle of the corridor once connecting Sariska to Ranthambhore, had promised us in the mid-1990s: “I will help rebuild the green corridor between Sariska and Ranthambhore.” Had his mission not been thwarted by a tragic road accident, Sariska might never have lost all its tigers.

The local extinction of Sariska should teach us one clear lesson – never, never again should we take the security of the tiger for granted, even in our best protected reserves. Rajpal Singh, a member of the Rajasthan Tiger Task Force, is among those working to bring tigers back to Sariska today (and pride back to Rajasthan). He believes that: “The current density of ungulates in Sariska is as good as in any of the best parks in the country such as Kanha, Nagarahole or Ranthambhore; the sanctuary is fit for the reintroduction of the tiger.”

Of course, even as we speak, more forests in India are being emptied. And the office of the Prime Minister of India is hopelessly out of synch with a growing number of national and state forest and wildlife departments mandated to expand and secure the fast depleting ecological foundation of India. Thus coal mines funded by the World Bank strip forests in Jharkhand, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, while nuclear reactors and uranium mines are being contemplated in the strike zones of the Sundarbans, Nagarjunasagar-Srisailam and Kanha Tiger Reserves. Meanwhile, politicians from every national and state party are celebrating the demise of the Forest (Conservation) Act at the hands of the Scheduled Tribes and other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, which is poised to gift millions of hectares of survival assets to people who have no means to protect land from commercial brigands (Sanctuary Vol. XXV No. 3 June 2005).

For all the hoopla therefore, instead of being the generation that saved the tiger, we may be the one that will forever wear the shame of having been responsible for its demise. We will need new poets, philosophers and thinkers such as Shakespeare, Gandhi or John Muir if we are ever to have a chance of negotiating our safe passage through the political wilderness that has unsettled the fragile ecology of the Indian subcontinent.

The fate of the tiger and that of the people of India are more closely linked than politicians, bureaucrats
and businessmen know. One of the prime reasons that the tiger and wildlife are in decline is deforestation. This also happens to be a prime cause of climate change. Young persons understand the connection, but those who are rooted in dogmatic development ideologies and old-fashioned economics seem unable to grasp the truth.

The forgotten Mrs. Gandhi

Here is what India’s late Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi wrote, one year before she midwifed Project Tiger: “Wildlife conservation is not a political issue. It concerns the survival of our natural heritage. It is hard to think of an India devoid of its magnificent animals, of the hard-pressed tiger going the way of the now extinct cheetah…”
Virtually, none of today’s politicians believe in this fundamental value articulated by Indira Gandhi and those that do prefer to keep silent as their more aggressive colleagues push forward with an economic agenda that is not only devastating India’s tigers, but India’s people too.

Project Tiger has now metamorphosed into the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), with more teeth, but not a whole lot more of that critical ingredient that worked so well between 1970 and 1984 – political support. Written in the dispassionate, staccato style of good statistical research, the tiger’s truth, pure and simple, stares back at the reader from the pages of the February 2008 Executive Summary, “Status of Tigers, Co-Predators and Prey in India,” authored by the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) and the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NCTA) of the Ministry of Environment and Forests: “Occupancy of a forest patch by tigers was negatively correlated with human disturbance indices
and positively correlated with prey availability, forest patch and core sizes.”

ut in simple English, the experts are telling us what the tiger needs: food, shelter and the absence of human disturbance. By the same token, humans need: food, shelter and a way of life that does not destroy ecosystems upon which the poorest of the poor are first dependent. It’s simple: tigers in India experience humans as anti-nature, as not-nature. Coincidentally, what is dawning on humans in this era of climate change, cyclones, droughts, floods, melting ice sheets, burning forests and vanishing life forms, is that the longer they cling to their outmoded insistence on seeing themselves as independent of nature, indeed as nature-dominators, the more harshly nature will punish and forsake them. This is not a religious reading of events; it is an empirical one.

More hopefully, humanity may be on the cusp of learning (and this is truly an exciting crossroads to be at) that tigers and humans need exactly the same thing – for people to come back to Earth, as it were. Where are we now, vis-à-vis the natural world and the tiger and other species, and how do we begin to chart a path to where we want and need to be? In the June and August 2007 Sanctuary cover stories, we asked, “Quo vadis Panthera tigris?” – “where is the tiger headed?” In
this piece, we expand that question to, “Quo vadis Panthera tigris and Homo sapiens?” for the simple reason that humanity’s fate, and that of the tiger and other life on

Earth, are intertwined. Without understanding that truth, without feeling it in our very bones, human beings may ultimately
have no future on Earth, or one so impoverished that we barely recognise it.

Business as usual will sink us

Where we are now, we humans, is a bad place, what with myriad anthropogenic changes in the environment. If we continue to pursue “business as usual,” consuming the planet’s resources as if they are limitless, our children will face a very bleak future indeed. Indians are confronted daily with the warning signs that their government and business sectors are charting a development path that literally cannot be sustained. Himalayan glaciers are melting and ephemeral food security offered by Punjab, Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh is already shaky. Many Mumbaikars suffered horribly when the climate-aggravated Mithi river flooded its banks in July 2005. Countless numbers lost their lives along the Bay of Bengal in India when the deadly tsunami hit in December 2004. More recently, just a touch further east, on May 3, 2008, Cyclone Nargis killed over 60,000 people and devastated the lives of at least two million. The death toll would have been considerably lower had mangrove forests and other natural coastal buffers against storm surges not been so severely degraded by India, Bangladesh and Myanmar. Ignorant of such impacts by government design, billions of dollars are being canvassed by the West Bengal State Government as ‘investments’ in the Sundarbans, which must ultimately destroy the only real asset possessed by the Sundarbans – the mangroves. Entire islands in the Sundarbans have been submerged by rising sea levels, creating the first of the predicted millions of climate refugees in India.

With the tiger having vanished from more than half of its former range in the subcontinent within five short decades, we are down now to just 1,300 cats, if that. The animal can now reliably be found only within Protected Areas, (national parks and sanctuaries), including the NTCA’s critical tiger habitats and a bit beyond perhaps. And even within the reserves, true security for the cats is still a distant dream. Insufficient funds, no recruitment, capricious transfer of officers, political interference, all serve the interests of short-sighted politicians, the international wildlife trade and of commercial interests that would rather see the tiger gone and mining and project revenues in their
banks. Cut off from other forests, tigers, rhinos, elephants and other wildlife are easy targets for poachers, like ducks in a small pond.

Solving the tiger tangle

For those who consistently demand that solutions be offered for the many problems articulated, we would respond that such solutions have been consistently put forward (see NTCA Prescriptions below), but they have been ignored because they involve changing fixed positions, altering strategies and, horror of horrors, admitting the mistakes of past ways.

The people at the helm of national affairs and those who sit anonymously behind them, spurring them to retain flawed policies that enable the already rich to make frighteningly large sums of money in quick time, are not going to meekly surrender. They will have to be forced to do the right thing. Unravelling the tiger tangle depends on our ability to force the
right thing to be done. Not surprisingly, solving the climate change crisis requires almost identical steps to be taken. That then is the bottom line. That is also our last and final call.

 

he NTCA prescription to save the royal Bengal tiger

The WII report commissioned by the Central Government offers path-breaking recommendations to secure the future of “free-ranging” tigers in India. But the quiet, bureaucratic language is easy to overlook. Yet, if the tiger and the people of the Indian subcontinent are to survive, both Centre and States must accept the logic of protecting critical tiger habitats, which Sanctuary strongly endorses:

This study shifts the focus from tiger number and Protected Area oriented conservation practices to landscape level holistic conservation strategies… Each landscape complex consists of units that still have contiguous tiger habitat and contain one to many breeding populations of tigers (source populations). Within each landscape unit, there exists a potential to manage some of the tiger populations as meta-populations. This enhances the conservation potential of each of the single opulations and the probability of their long-term persistence… For establishing and maintaining high density source populations of tigers, it is essential to set aside inviolate areas devoid of human presence within each landscape. These source populations should be connected through multiple use forests (buffers and corridors) where human land uses conducive to maintaining low density tiger occupancy are permitted and fostered by providing appropriate incentives to local communities.