
Rising tiger numbers and new development projects: Will India’s tiger conservation story be a success in the long run?
Amidst the growing number of developmental projects around national parks and tiger reserves, it seems as if the shine of India’s tiger conservation story success won’t last long. In the wake of a series of new development projects that promise to cater to the demands of India’s rising population, it is India’s tigers and other fauna that become victims to this unprecedented development process.
On one hand, India recorded a giant leap in the number of tigers from 1706 in 2011 to 2226 in 2014, and on the other, it saw approval for a number of projects that aim to directly threaten the existence of these cats and their habitat.
The National Board for Wildlife (NBWL), an advisory board with noted conservationists as its members and a mission to conserve India’s wild flora and fauna, has recently threatened the existence of some 200 sq. km of tiger habitat in Panna tiger reserve, Madhya Pradesh, by giving its approval to the Ken-Betwa river-linking project. Besides that, it also cleared the proposal for the Kutku Mandal dam project which aims to submerge over 1000 hectares of forests in Jharkhand’s Palamau tiger reserve, approved a project to assess the uranium mining possibility in Amrabad tiger reserve, Telangana, allowed for commercial fishing in core areas of Satpura and Pench tiger reserves, approved bauxite mining project in Achanakmar tiger reserve, and cleared proposals for construction of roads through Corbett, Dudhwa, and Katarniaghat tiger reserves.
“Tigers are territorial and solitary animals. The big cats are constantly moving across the fragmented central Indian forest landscape in search of a territory — a forest patch to settle down — a place it can call home,” says Subhoranjan Sen, field director of Pench tiger reserve in Madhya Pradesh. And this claim is always proven by stories of gypsy tigers(all tigers are gypsies) who wander off hundreds of kilometers away from their homes and end up in other forests and reserves. A sub-adult male from Pench in 2008 went missing until 2011 when he was spotted again in Kanha national park, some 150 km(96 miles) away from his home. The cat probably used the well-documented Kanha-Pench corridor –a small stream of forests threatened by a highway building project — regularly used by tigers to commute between the two reserves. Another male cat from Nagazira tiger reserve trolled for a 129 km( 80 miles) and made its way to Pench in 2015–16. To add more numbers to this, four other cats migrated from Pench to the Bhandar reserve forest, west of Nagzira in Maharashtra. According to Mr. Rajesh Gopal, secretary general of the Global Tiger Forum, the survival of tigers, in the long run, depends upon the conservation of these forest corridors & the destruction of these ecological hotspots is paving the way to the isolation of tiger reserves in India ultimately crippling the gene pool flow.
Bottom line, around 35 percent of India’s wild tiger population lives outside protected areas in forests that are fast being sold off to commercial projects. These corridors are the sole tools that help in the sustenance of wild tigers by making gene pool flow possible — a key element in warding off genetic anomalies henceforth ensuring the survival of new litter. And with a wide range of development projects that promise to interfere with the ecological balance of these delicate ecosystems, it is time for India to reconsider and modify its conservation strategies that aim not just towards increasing tiger population, but also towards the sustainable maintenance of forested lands, outside tiger reserves, that these cats use.
Sources:
3. http://www.livemint.com/Politics/ciSuRCaSXKtJD0VH6gzeiO/A-prayer-for-the-homeless-tigers.html
