India's tigers dying out

INDIA: India's tiger population has alarmingly declined to 1,411, less than half the previous estimate, due to poaching and encroachments on their habitat, a government census has revealed.

A census in 2001 and 2002 indicated the existence of 3,642 tigers while a century ago their number was about 40,000. Counting of tigers by the National Tiger Conservation Authority, however, could not be carried out in the central states of Chattisgarh and Jharkhand due to the raging Maoist insurgency.

But the exercise was continuing in the Sundarbans in eastern India, home to the magnificent Bengal tiger and to thousands of widows the ferocious animal had created by killing their menfolk.

Valmik Thapar, a conservationist and adviser to prime minister Manmohan Singh on wildlife affairs, is pessimistic, believing that the dwindling tiger populations will never recover.

He blamed it on "bad governance, a ridiculously brainless bureaucracy, a ministry of environment and forests that has malfunctioned for the last five years, and a prime minister who had honourable intentions but was badly advised by his own office".

Thousands of forest guard posts lie empty, conservationists say. Guards are badly paid, poorly equipped and lack incentive to stop poachers selling tiger parts to smugglers who ferry them mostly to China for use as medicines and aphrodisiacs.

In 2005, the government said there were no tigers left in Sariska Tiger Reserve, 200km west of New Delhi, three decades after it established Project Tiger, a national effort to protect the animal. A public outcry led the government to commit 6 billion rupees (€103 million) over the next five years towards tiger conservation.

© 2008 The Irish Times

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times