By Neena Bhandari
NEW DELHI, Mar 28 1998 (IPS)

Every time, forest guards patrolling the vast Dudhwa National Park, in central India, spot a kill, they quickly alert the authorities who have the carcass removed.

The dead cattle are hauled out of the park before poachers get a chance to poison the kill — one of their favourite ways of trapping tigers for the illegal export of their skin, organs and bones to markets in East Asia.

There has been a spurt in such killings over the last two years. In December 1997, two tigers each were poisoned in Dudhwa and Corbett in the Himalayan foothills, parks carved out under the three-decade-old tiger conservation efforts.

Now, with most tigers in the wild having been hunted down, conservationists are trying to save those that remain in India’s protected parks and sanctuaries which enclose 2 percent of the total land mass.

The Tiger Conservation Project, which seeks to compensate villages for the loss of cattle that was killed by tigers in the park, is the latest of several initiatives undertaken to rescue the striped feline from the list of endangered animals.

Tigers once roamed the length of Asia, from the Caspian Sea to Indonesia. However, with the extinction of the Caspian tiger in 1970, the Indian subcontinent is now its westernmost range, and with the few remaining in China, Nepal and Indo-China and the Russian far east, the Royal Bengal Tiger remains the last, most prominent sub-species.

Poaching and the pressure of humans on their natural habitat as village populations swell, have taken a toll on wildlife. The conflict between parks and people has reached serious proportions in the last few years, say wildlife authorities.

“As human and cattle populations vie for space with wild animals, it is from these sub-optimal habitats that te tiger will be lost,” cat specialist Dr. R.S. Chundawat of the Wildlife Institute of India observes.

Twenty two tigers and six leopards were killed by poachers since 1994 in India’s largest tiger reserve, the Nagarjunasagar- Srisailam park in Andhra Pradesh — where over the last 10 years, nearly 60 percent of the tiger population has been wiped out.

Officials in the southern state have experimented with paying compensation to those who lost cattle, in an effort to tackle the problem of poachers. The root of the problem is often disaffected villagers living in areas adjoining the parks who feel they have been asked to pay too high a price for tiger conservation.

But bureaucratic delays in the payment of compensation frustrated the plan, and villagers continued to take the law into their own hands and hunt down the cattle-lifting tigers.

In January this year, the World Wide Fund for Nature-India launched the cattle compensation package, designed to be handled exclusively by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working in villages in and around the sanctuaries.

The scheme offers monetary incentives for providing immediate information regarding kill: 300 rupees (one dollar is roughly 38 rupees) is paid to those reporting within 24 hours; 200 rupees for after a day but within two days; and 100 rupees for between 48 and 72 hours. Also the cattle owner is paid compensation.

Conservationists are also battling to stop the illegal but lucrative trade in tiger parts for the Chinese traditional medicine industry in East Asia. The worldwide campaign against the trade has seen a reduction in the traffic, but it has not stopped.

Of concern is the fact that despite the increased public awareness, the domestic sale of Chinese medicines listing tiger bones and organs as ingredients remains legal in big markets like Japan and the United States.

This is the Year of the Tiger according to the Chinese calendar, and believed to be very auspicious. Tiger stripes are painted on children’s foreheads to ensure vigour and health and a child born in 1998 is considered powerful and passionate.

But little concern is being shown for the endangered animal, whose numbers have declined by 95 percent this century. At the start of the 1900s, there were eight sub-species, three of which including the Bali and Javanese tiger have disappeared for ever.

The Royal Bengal Tigers, native to India and Bangladesh, may number a mere 3,000 today, while the Indo-Chinese is just over 1,000 and the Sumatran and Amur around 400. The South China tiger is on the verge of extinction, only 20 survive in zoos.

India which at the start of the century had some 40,000 tigers, was left with only 4,000 in the early 1960s which led to the launching of Operation Tiger, a project to save the animal. Conservation efforts have helped somewhat, because of all the range states, India still has the largest number of tigers.

Tiger census conducted by the pug mark technique revealed 3,750 tigers in 1993 and 1997 census unofficially puts the number at around 3,000.

But the prognosis is still bad. Dr. M.K. Ranjitsinh, director of the World Wide Fund for Nature-India’s Tiger Conservation Programme (TCP), warns: “Tigers in much larger unprotected habitats are constantly decreasing and will continue to do so and may almost disappear by 2010, except in a few very remote areas.”

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