Poaching of tiger for its body parts gravely threaten its future. What are the Indian and international laws that protect tigers? Any person who commits such an offence is punishable with an imprisonment of not less than three years extending up to seven years along with a fine of not less than fifty thousand rupees which may extend up to two lakh rupees.
In the event of a second or subsequent conviction he can receive imprisonment for a term of not less than seven years and a fine which shall be not less than five lakh rupees and can vary up to a maximum of fifty lakh rupees The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora CITES presently ratified by over countries, makes international trade in tiger parts illegal.
India has been a signatory of this convention since the year Who are the major stakeholders in tiger conservation in India today? What are the methods to estimate tiger populations? It is conducted at regular intervals to know the current tiger populations and population trends. Besides estimating the number of tigers the method also helps to gather information on the density of the tiger populations and associated prey.
Many different methods are used to estimate the number of tigers. In this method the imprints of the pugmark of the tiger were recorded and used as a basis for identification of individuals.
Now it is largely used as one of the indices of tiger occurrence and relative abundance. Recent methods used to estimate the numbers of tigers are camera trapping and DNA finger-printing.
In camera trapping, the photograph of the tiger is taken and individuals are differentiated on the basis of the stripes on the body. In the latest technique of DNA fingerprinting, tigers can be identified from their scats. Pugmark Census Technique was a commonly used technique to estimate tiger numbers.
What is the nature of Human-Wildlife conflict in India? For centuries humans and wild animals have co-existed in India. This is mainly because the human populations were much lower and the forest areas were large.
However, over the past few decades, the human population has grown manifold, thereby creating great pressure on forest resources. Large areas on which the forests were vast and undisturbed have given way to human habitations and settlements. Grazing by domestic cattle in forest areas has resulted in disease out-breaks among wild herbivores, and also reduced availability of fodder, forcing wild herbivores to depredate crops that adjoin forests.
In retaliation, villagers sometimes resort to stealing power from power lines and setting up live electric fence to kill crop raiders. Due to lack of sufficient wild prey base in the forests, leopards frequent villages looking for food. In the process, humans, particularly children and women get killed. Lack of prey base also forces carnivores such as tigers, leopards and dholes wild dog and wolves to kill domestic cattle for survival. Villagers may again retaliate by poisoning these wild animals.
There are also activities like stealing of animals killed by tigers lead to injury and death of human beings. Villagers retaliate by killing tigers when they kill cattle. Does tiger farming increase tiger populations in the wild? No, captive breeding of tiger or tiger farming does not help to increase tiger populations in the wild.
Tigers in the wild breed very well provided they have a good habitat and adequate protection. Problems related to habitat, prey base and protection can not be solved by captive breeding. Furthermore rehabilitation of a captive bred tiger in the wild has been unsuccessful. This is because tigers in the wild learn hunting by a process of close association with the mother, a situation which cannot be replicated in captivity. Therefore tiger farming is only a way to breed tigers for their skin and derivatives to meet market demands and cannot be seen as a conservation tool.
Moreover, if the trade in tiger body part is legalized in the name of tiger farming, eventually the tigers in the wild would be poached. Body part of wild tigers would always be preferred much more than that of farm-bred tigers.
The concept of farming the tigers for commercial trade should be abandoned for ever. Human ailments can be treated and cured with drugs other than the medicines prepared with tiger body parts. Where do we stand in Tiger Conservation today? India was the first country in the world to champion the cause of conservation of the tiger and its natural habitats. Project Tiger, launched in , was one of the largest conservation initiatives of its kind globally.
After a great success initially, it has had mixed results. Focus has been sharpened on tiger conservation issues across the country and many prime tiger habitats were designated as Tiger Reserves. Today, only six subspecies remain. The spectre of a world without tigers led 13 nations to meet in in St Petersburg, Russia, where they declared that they would double their wild tiger numbers by But all except India, Nepal and Bhutan are struggling to save their tigers, even in protected reserves.
Against this backdrop, India is the beacon. In , it has invested 3. Government scientists are studying all aspects of the animal, and are heading a large tracking study to understand tiger behaviour. The efforts have paid off, according to the government.
It announced in July that the number of wild tigers in the country had doubled from 1, in to 2, today — meaning that India has met the St Petersburg target. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that tiger conservation could go hand in hand with building roads, railways and homes. The animals are increasingly becoming isolated in small reserves that prioritize tourism. If the cats leave the parks, the risks are rising that they will encounter humans and infrastructure, with tragic results for both the animals and people.
Some scientists question whether tiger numbers in India have truly increased and are attempting to get a more accurate count of populations in specific areas.
Other researchers are studying how to get people and the carnivores to coexist. A motion-activated camera trap shows a tiger using the same path as people and livestock. Credit: Wildlife Conservation Trust. Saving tigers is difficult enough, but research efforts in India are made more challenging by an apparent antagonism between the actors involved.
Some experts charge that government scientists sometimes present questionable evidence in support of state policies and hamper efforts by independent investigators. Such conflicts are routine in tiger conservation globally, says John Goodrich, who heads the tiger programme at Panthera, a conservation organization in New York City. But centuries of hunting and habitat destruction left fewer than 2, wild individuals by the s. There are 50 reserves today under the programme, and about half are well managed, according to a government assessment.
But the reserves are small, averaging less than 1, square kilometres — much smaller than many protected areas in Africa. These are unfavourable conditions for the solitary tiger. And tigers do not share easily, even with siblings or kids.
So when a cub hits adolescence at about one and a half years, it begins roaming to find territory in which to live and hunt. If the tiger reserve is already full, it has two options: either push out an old or weak tiger and take over the space, or keep moving well outside the reserve until it finds unoccupied territory.
Every four years, an army of forest guards, conservationists and volunteers fans out over an area roughly the size of Japan and carries out a comprehensive census. The workers place camera traps in some parts of tiger reserves for about 35 days. Then they walk on foot, collecting sightings of tiger tracks, scat and signs of prey and human disturbance.
This is called a sign survey. They send the data to scientists at the government-run Wildlife Institute of India WII in Dehradun, who identify individual tigers in photos from their unique stripe patterns and then estimate local tiger densities in reserves.
They create a calibration model that links the tiger densities to the collected signs, then input the sign-survey data into this model to derive nationwide numbers. Sources: Y. V, Jhala, Q. Natesh et al. But many scientists are sceptical. When I walked with forest guards doing surveys in a reserve in May, they said they felt pressured by local officials to record positive tiger signs and ignore signs of human disturbance. In , they added 90 survey sites and 17, extra cameras.
Another point of contention is the data analysis, particularly the calibration model used to arrive at pan-India numbers. He has authored two studies critiquing the census method 2 , 3. Jhala refutes the criticisms about the accuracy of the census. He says there are safeguards to protect against bad data. Although the coverage has increased, he says the census is based on estimates of tiger density, so increasing the extent of the survey does not affect the trend calculations.
He has published a study refuting the accusations 4. The best way to resolve the disagreement, argue scientists, would be if the WII released raw data and model information to ecologists for independent analysis.
But Jhala says that releasing the geo-tagged data, even to scientists, could make the animals vulnerable to poaching — a claim that others dispute. For now, scientists can say only that the animals are thriving in some places, but doing poorly elsewhere. The biggest known conservation success is in central India, an area with 19 tiger reserves across 8 states. Most trees had dropped their leaves for the dry season, reservoirs had dipped low and everyone was waiting for the monsoons.
They have found that historically, tigers here have moved unhindered through forest corridors in search of territory, carrying precious new genes into distant populations. The central Indian tigers have high genetic variation, which should help them to adapt to environmental crises such as drought or disease 5. But the forest corridors in central India are fragmenting rapidly. Uma Ramakrishnan, an ecologist at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru, says that if infrastructure development in rural areas continues unabated, the genetic diversity of small populations could fall within a century.
A study assessed the probability of tiger extinctions in reserves in central India. If forest corridors remain intact between reserves right panel , they help limit extinctions compared with a business-as-usual case in which corridors are not maintained and there are resistance to movement from urban development, roads and traffic.
Adapted from P. Thatte et al. The government might then have to shuttle tigers between reserves to maintain the gene flow necessary for a population to stay healthy. In the worst-case scenario, tigers might get marooned in reserves and relatives might start breeding. Villages surround the reserve, and there are no other tiger populations nearby to seed new genes. Ramakrishnan and her colleagues have seen markers of inbreeding in the genomes of Ranthambore tigers 6.
In an unpublished study, they have detected regions of over a million base pairs of DNA without variation. In an average tiger, there are variations in every million or so base pairs. If these stretches harbour deleterious alleles, the offspring could have reduced fitness, increasing the risk of local extinction, she says.
The day before the frenzied night-time chase in Pench tiger reserve, Milind Pariwakam, a road ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Trust, and I drove there on a four-lane motorway called National Highway 44, or NH44 also known as NH7.
In a nation full of potholes, I appreciated the smooth road connecting two major cities and reducing travel time. But Pariwakam says the road comes at a high cost. Ashoka eschewed the hunt. Bon Bibi of Bengal, riding a tiger, is the guardian spirit of the Sundarbans. Indian tradition venerated and protected this beautiful animal. Akbar introduced trophy hunting on an elephant or the shikar. Jehangir killed 86 tigers and lions in his first 12 years as ruler. A Mughal meal included 36 to 40 meat dishes, including wildlife meats.
Large-scale killing started with the British. After the Battle of Plassey in , the British offered special rewards for any tiger killed. In , a severe famine in eastern India resulted in the reversal of farmland to jungle: by eliminating wildlife, revenue land was increased. Hunting was standard recreation for the British officials.
District level administrations facilitated hunts, local maharajas and zamindars lent their elephants, while peasants were employed as beaters on foot and were often mauled or killed by tigers: their lives were cheap, expendable. The sahibs took photographs with their kill, posing with the dead animal, gun in hand and one leg on the carcass, although generally finding and even killing the animal was accomplished by the natives.
Each viceroy had to shoot a record number of tigers. After his coronation in , King George V and his retinue killed 39 tigers in 10 days in Nepal. Animals like tigers, snakes, elephants, birds, etc.
Bounty-killing tipped populations wherever habitat was under pressure. The cheetah was eliminated; lions survived in Gir alone, thanks to the Nawab of Junagadh. Over 80, tigers were slaughtered between and Indian maharajas outdid the British. The Maharaja of Kotah outfitted a Rolls Royce Phantom with spotlights for night hunting, mounted a machine gun and a Lantaka cannon for tiger safaris.
Rewa kings in Central India had to kill tigers after their coronation. The late Maharaja of Mysore and his guests shot over a hundred tigers between and This does not include the other wildlife they killed.
Farmers blame tigers for killing cattle and shoot or poison them.
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