India's 'endangered tiger' tale gets a twist

India's 'endangered tiger' tale gets a twist
Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. The town economy depends on tiger-seeking tourists.

In season, in the pre-dawn hours, the place is a gushing river of tourists, touts and tour taxis in a thriving Operation See the Tiger. The boom might now go bust.

The Supreme Court order could virtually shut down major tiger reserves in India - and the supporting infrastructure of resorts, guides, vehicle owners, restaurants, bus operators, villages around "tiger towns" like Ramnagar in the foothills of the Kumaon Himalayas.

The 1,300-square-kilometer Corbett National Park is the first and one of India's finest tiger reserve areas. Locals say the tiger population here is actually increasing, but the court order seems the inevitable outcome of long-festering tiger-poaching problems in Corbett and other reserves and unmonitored tourism-industry growth encroaching into restricted forest areas.

In imposing the ban, a Supreme Court bench of judges, Swatanter Kumar and Ibrahim Kalifullah, was responding to conservationist Ajay Dubey's petition demanding removal of commercial tourism activities from core areas in tiger reserves.

Since the core area, or buffer zone, can sometimes cover about 1,000 square kilometers, plenty of real-estate issues and stakeholders are desperately involved in this new twist in the tiger's endangered tale. More than 150 resorts and hotels in Ramnagar depend on the animal to attract guests.

Only about 3,700 tigers are considered to exist in the world today, and India has about 1,700 of these. It also has has 42 tiger reserves, [1] the most in the world. Most of the reserves could join the tiger on the endangered list if the court order is implemented permanently.

"Tourists come here mainly to see the tiger," said Ajay, an aggrieved Corbett tour operator. "A tiger gets killed in an accident, and they say it's poached."

Local people argue that dead tigers in Corbett are not victims of poaching. One tour-operator claims a some have died of pollution - suggesting that they might have inhaled too much carbon dioxide.
The industry has mounted a desperate counter-case for the Supreme Court judges to hear on whether to shut down core tiger-inhabited areas. The core question is whether tourism is actually killing the tiger, or whether funding for the animal's survival depends on the money tourists bring in have that increasingly rare sighting.

Some resorts have already shut down near Ramnagar, including the award-winning Camp Forktail Creek at the Corbett National Park boundary. "We closed down before the court order because of problems of unregulated tourism," owner Minakshi Pandey told Asia Times Online.

Land sharks are meanwhile grabbing chunks of the surrounding Sal forests from tribal people and selling them to real-estate developers. The ensuing concrete jungle of hotels has overrun environment-friendly resorts such as Forktail Creek, whose particular selling point was hut stays in an isolated, forest atmosphere. Guests live in mud huts, without electricity, and with lanterns and candlelight. Tube lights fill the neighborhood instead of starlight.

Pandey said the local hotel owners had formed an association and hired a lawyer to plead in the Supreme Court. The big hope is that hotel owners' "big" connections in Delhi - read politicians - can help out and that the Supreme Court order, in whatever form, can be dodged in some way or other.

Local governments too are appealing against the temporary order. The central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh in its affidavit sought changes in the Supreme Court order of July 24. [2] The Madhya Pradesh government says there are 650 villages housed in the core areas, with about 346,000 people, half of them tribals, eking out their living through tourism.

"Despite 20 years of international conservation efforts, we are losing ground to save the tiger," writes Craig Kasnoff in his website on endangered species. [3] "In the endangered-species list, all subspecies of tigers are considered critically endangered species."

Multiple factors led to the tiger's present tale. Given that each issue needs viewing from all possible angles, how much did the tiger's diet lead to its demise? Who knows if the tiger may have been spared much of its current survival woes if it had adapted in feeding its average adult body weight of 306 kilograms.

The species Panthera tigris had about 2 million years to change itself from being only a flesh eater. It didn't - unlike humans, who live happily on plant products. And as it needs sometimes 200 square kilometers of territorial area to hunt its prey, real-estate conflicts with humans were inevitable.

The other largely ignored perspective seems to be the view from deer, antelope, cattle and other mild animals that form the tiger's rigid non-grass-eating diet - keeping the tiger is a threat to their very lives. Yet eating humans is another major problem that is endangering the tiger. They kill an average of about 25 people in Bangladesh [4] each year, for instance, in the land conflicts between tiger and humans.

Ironically, the more tigers are killed, the higher the price poachers can fetch for capturing or killing those that remain. The problem is not limited to India. Fewer than 2,500 of the majestic Bengal tiger (P tigris tigris) survive in India, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh. The Indochinese tiger (P tigris corbetti), also known as Corbett's tiger, count to barely 350 in Thailand, Cambodia, China, Myanmar and Vietnam.

In China, where the tiger is already extinct in the wild, only about 55 South China tigers (P tigris amoyensis) live in captivity, despite the best efforts of the government to breed it. India's Supreme Court on August 29 resumes its efforts to spare subcontinental tigers from a similar fate.

Sourced: atimes