:: Wildlife Trust Of India :: Time to count tigers once again

It is time to count tigers once again. In India, this is almost seasonal. Once the winter has receded and the bulbuls have proclaimed spring, once the first of the fragrant dassehris replace the bland safedas, it seems that tigers need to be counted. There used to be a time when trends were more important than numbers, but those were the days when the tiger was not yet a political symbol, one that is today approximated equally by the government and the World Bank, by conservation charities and mobile phone companies. If one needs to scream out the number of tigers that remain across billboards in the country, we need numbers. If we are to write the obituary of the tiger just once more, we need numbers. Numbers that live, numbers that die, numbers that are born, numbers that emigrate. This Russian roulette fascination with numerals, calls for the new national census to be once again the focus of the nation’s conservation agenda.

This time the Wildlife Trust of India is in it as well. One of the few handpicked national NGOs that have been associated with the National Tiger Conservation Authority and the Wildlife Institute of India to help come up with a number. This is not just as one of the pretty NGO observers who are called up by authorities to fill in the mandatory blanks but as one who the government feels have the scientific ability and on-ground presence to make a difference in getting at the truth. A dozen field biologists from the Trust are to be involved in the tiger enumeration. Eight protected areas will be covered by them and the data collected fed into the national whole.

Interestingly the areas that are assigned to WTI are not the ones that people immediately associate with tigers: there is no Ranthambhore, no Corbett, no Bandhavgarh; instead the unsung and un-heralded Valmikis, Dudhwas and Achanakmars are part of the landscape.

How can WTI contribute to this mammoth exercise? I feel in three ways. To begin with, by extending the rigor that has been associated with the new found census techniques to the most remote areas where normally NGOs or civil society do not function. These are the most difficult areas for the government to enumerate, they are also the least sexy for the NGOs to associate themselves with. Precisely the reason why these will be critical in filling the gaps in knowledge. Perhaps the total number of tigers in all of these less known tiger landscapes will not be as many as one or two of the better known ones, but these are the tigers that will in all probability be the ‘missing’ ones in the tiger numbers of India. For instance, is it well-known that the north east was not even included in the first phase of the new tiger enumeration? Eight states of the Indian union cursorily summarized because of the inability to have people working in remote locations. This is nobody’s blame game, it is instead a challenge to WTI to help the government fill in these gaps.

Secondly, it is important that in doing so, we are perhaps generating background data that will help protect the landscapes themselves. If Valmiki, a part of Tiger Conservation Unit priority I is known to be a tiger habitat of worth, if more tigers than previously thought possible comes from an unsung part of the north east, if a protected area in southern India is found to have more tigers than other tiger reserves in the state, our effort would have been well worth the while. The tiger was always conceptualised by conservation planners as being a flagship species and being a flagship means attracting the world to conserve an area and thousands of other species.

Thirdly, in helping fine-tune the science of tiger counting. From total counts to pugmark census to camera trapping, the science of tiger censusing has seen a sea change over the years. And of course, it has drawn much acrimony with some commentators even calling tiger conservation a failed exercise. The truth is far from that. It is only that faulty counting and wrong analysis (sometimes intentional, other times just wrong) have led to the idea that tiger conservation is failing. If the numbers of tigers counted were wrong all along, the decline may not be as dramatic as the world is making out to be. Does this mean the tiger is not in trouble? Not at all. Poaching is high, habitats are vanishing and the political will in setting aside tracts of lands as inviolate is abysmally low. Does that mean that the numbers we are touting now alongwith brushing our teeth -1411 in India 6022 in the world are correct? Probably not as well. So, what is true? I am hoping that this census will bring us closer to the truth. And I am hoping that we play an honest and constructive part in this mammoth exercise.