Is the Indian Tiger on the verge of extinction?

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    When television advertisements pressed the panic button by announcing that only 1,411 Indian tigers are left in the wild, fears of extinction of Indian tigers gripped India.  Thanks to the growing awareness and concern of Indians towards wildlife, ‘Save the Tiger’ campaign is fast becoming one of the most publicized wildlife conservation campaigns in India.

 
India lost about a hundred tigers in the year 2009.  And, 28 tiger deaths have been reported this year till the time of writing this piece.  The tiger now tops the list of the top ten endangered species of the world. The world is believed to have lost about 95 percent of all the tigers in the last century.
 
The Tiger is a mammal belonging to the cat family. It is one of the largest and the most beautiful feline species to have roamed the earth.
 
Originally, there were nine subspecies of modern tigers—the Royal Bengal Tiger, the Indochinese Tiger, the Malayan Tiger, the Sumatran Tiger, the Siberian Tiger, the South China Tiger, the Bali Tiger, the Javan Tiger and the Caspian Tiger. Of these, the Bali, the Javan and the Caspian tigers vanished from the face of this earth in the twentieth century.
 
Today, the tiger range countries include India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, China, Malay Peninsula, Sumatra and Siberia.
 
The Royal Bengal Tiger is the most common of all and accounts for nearly two-third of all tiger subspecies alive today which is believed to be around 3,000.  India is home to almost half of the world’s tiger population and over two-third of the 2,000 Royal Bengal Tigers in the wild today.
 
Contrary to popular belief, white tigers are not a subspecies unto themselves.  They are albinos of the Royal Bengal Tiger which were first spotted at Rewa in Madhya Pradesh.
 
The scientific name of the Royal Bengal Tiger or the Indian Tiger is panthera tigris tigris.  The head and body of a fully grown Indian tiger measure between five and six feet.  Its tail could add another three feet to its length. The weight of the Indian tiger varies from 109 to 227 kg.  The females are slender and weigh much less as compared to their male counterparts.  Tigers have retractable claws, padded feet, strong jaws and canines that help them tear their prey apart and eat meat.  They have powerful limbs which help them to drag preys bigger than themselves.
 
Unlike lions which hunt in prides, the tiger is a lone hunter. Also, unlike the lion, the tiger does not believe in long chases.  It prefers to crawl up as close to the prey as possible and then launch its attack.  Their night vision is remarkable and they make excellent nocturnal hunters. 
 
Tigers avoid human beings except in conflict situations or when they come face to face with human beings suddenly.  Some instances of man-eating have been reported when they were pushed to extreme situations. Tigers are great swimmers and they can also climb trees.
 
Tigers are fiercely territorial. They protect their territory aggressively.  The average territory of a tiger is approximately 25 sq km. Every tiger scent marks its territory with its urine.  Violators of territory are challenged and a fight ensues to decide the victor.  The vanquished has to leave the territory in question and look for other options.
 
The strongest males mate with female tigers when they are in heat.  The number of cubs in a litter could be anything between two and six.  The cubs cannot hunt during the first 18 months and many of them remain with their mothers for two or three years before they establish their own territories.  They achieve sexual maturity at the age of four.  Males play no role in rearing the cubs.
 
The average lifespan of a tiger is 15 years.  However, in the wild, it is reduced to 8 to 10 years.
 
Typically, the colour of the tiger’s coat ranges from rusty-red to rusty-brown with a whitish underbelly and the area between the limbs, a white area around the face and stripes ranging from brown or gray to pure black.  The form and density of stripes differ from subspecies to subspecies.  The ground colour of the Siberian tiger is paler than other tiger subspecies.
 
Most Tigers have more than a hundred stripes. The stripes on their body are vertical whereas those on their limbs are horizontal.  The stripe pattern is unique to each tiger. Stripe patterns could be used to identify individuals in the same way as we use fingerprints to identify human beings. However, due to difficulties in identifying this distinguishing feature during fleeting moments in the field, other identification marks are preferred. The stripe pattern originates in the skin of the tiger and extends to its coat. Tigers also sport white spots behind their ears. Their coats blend beautifully with their surroundings and offer perfect camouflage to them.
 
 A tiger’s roar can be heard as far away as 3 km.  The movement of the tiger is greeted with pin-drop silence except for the occasional alarm calls raised by rhesus monkeys, langurs, peafowls, chitals, sambhars and other sentinels of the jungle to warn other animals of the tiger’s presence.
 
The tiger enjoys protection in India as the vehicle of mother goddess Durga from time immemorial.  The tiger was later named the national animal of India replacing the Asiatic lion to increase its protection.  And, the Project Tiger is designed to provide additional protection to this magnificent cat and prevent it from becoming extinct. 
 
About 40,000 tigers are believed to have roamed the Indian jungles at the beginning of the 20th century.  Now, we seem to have a little over 1,400.  It is a matter of concern—not so much for the fact that so many have died but because most of them have died under questionable circumstances. 
 
Peter Jackson was the first conservationist who set the alarm bell ringing in October 1992 when he announced that “I give 10 years for the tiger to be virtually extinct.” Peter Jackson was the Chairman of the Cats Specialist Group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) which is now called the World Conservation Union. At that time, the tiger population of India was estimated at 3,750. 
 
Long before that, in 1969, the IUCN had a meeting of its general assembly in Delhi.  Senior Forest Official Kailash Sankhala’s report on the status of tigers presented at the assembly resulted in a call for moratorium on tiger killings and protection of tigers in India.  Following this, the Indian Board for Wildlife issued instructions to states to ban tiger hunting for five years. Now, hunting of wildlife is banned in India.
 
In 1972, a prominent trustee of the World Wildlife Fund (Now, Worldwide Fund for Nature known as WWF in short), Guy Montfort urged Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to save Indian tigers from extinction.  The first ever census of the Indian tiger which was conducted the same year, placed the tiger count at 1,827.  That was disturbing.
 
On an average 400-500 tigers are estimated to have been killed for a variety of reasons every year since the beginning of the twentieth century.  That prompted Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to launch Project Tiger in 1973. 
 
The Project Tiger was launched on April 1, 1973.  Initially, eight tiger reserves were created.  These are Bandipur, Corbett, Kanha, Manas, Melghat, Palamau, Ranthambhore, and Simlipal. Sunderbans was added to this list the same year. 
 
Since then, several wild life preserves have been brought under Project Tiger.  Today, there are 37 Tiger reserves in India.  But, nearly half of the tiger population in India still lives in wildlife preserves outside Tiger reserves.
 
In the beginning everybody believed that the reason for depletion of tiger population was due to hunting for trophies. But, the arrest of the kingpin of illegal trade in Indian wildlife, Sansar Chand, in the 1990s blew the lid off an organized poaching racket to feed the international market.  The route of his illegal trade lead through our neighbouring countries all the way up to China where each and every part of the tiger was being put to some use or the other.   
 
Tigers are poisoned and shot as a result of human-animal conflict and poaching.  They are also trapped and snared by poachers. 
 
In a nutshell, tigers do not face any serious threat from inter-animal confrontation because of their size and survival instincts.  However, the animal that tiger dreads most is the wild dog which hunts in packs.  Tigers face problems of intra-tiger conflicts during mating season and also when certain pockets get overpopulated following excessive litters.  Tiger-human conflicts begin when (1) human beings start encroaching upon tiger territory; (2) when forest rights of indigenous people are affected as a result of protection to tiger; or, (3) when weaker tigers are relegated to fringe areas in their fight for territory.  This happens when there is dearth of territory to accommodate males in the litter when they grow up and seek out territories for themselves.
 
But, the main threat to the tiger comes from poachers who feed the international market for wildlife products.  There have also been stray instances in the northeast where armed insurgents had resorted to poaching to fund their activities.
 
Apart from tiger skin, its bones, teeth, nails, meat—in fact, all tiger parts are used as raw material for something or the other in China.  Tiger bones are used in a variety of Chinese medicines including aphrodisiacs.  Tiger meat is a delicacy and the soup made from its penis is highly valued as an aphrodisiac among the Chinese.  Tiger nails and teeth are used as ornaments and embellishments and worn around the neck as they are believed to bestow great power on the owner.
 
The tiger is believed to be at the top of a large and complex food chain.  Therefore, the existence of a healthy tiger population in a forest is, in a way, an indication of the existence of a healthy population of prey species such as spotted deer, bison (gaur), sambhar and others which are largely herbivorous.  This, in turn, means that the vegetation of the forest is intact.  However, some biologists contend that using the tiger as an indicator species to assess the biodiversity of the entire forest may not give the correct picture.
 
On the whole, Project Tiger has not only helped in protecting tigers but has also extended protection to other endangered species such as the swamp deer, the elephant, the rhino, the Indian bison and other diverse floral and faunal species as they share their habitats with those of the tigers.
 
I would take this figure of 1,411 Indian tigers in the wild with a pinch of salt.  For one thing, this figure represents the estimate of the National Tiger Conservation Authority in 2008.  Things have changed during the last two years. 
 
The figures doled out after tiger counts have always been under the cloud because we are yet to devise a foolproof system for counting tigers in the wild. 
 
The ‘pugmark analysis’ system that is used for tiger counts in India has been dubbed as unscientific because there is possibility of duplication as the people who lift pugmarks may not be well trained.
 
The problem with pugmarks is that the pugmark that looks a little smaller on dry ground may look bigger on wet areas near waterholes because they are more pronounced there.  It would take an expert to make an accurate assessment in such situations. Also, the forest floor of the tiger reserves in northeastern states are carpeted by a thick layer of dead leaves on which pugmarks do not register.
 
The other option is to use the ‘line transact’ method suggested by the Smithsonian Institute which is based on the territory of individuals.  While this might help reduce duplication in areas densely populated by tigers, it may not be so effective in areas where the tigers have more than 25 sq km to themselves. 
 
The photo recording of the tigers that is being used now is more accurate and we may hope to have acceptable figures for the population of tigers in the time to come.
 
When the success of Project Tiger is assessed on the basis of statistics, the importance of statistical accuracy cannot be underestimated.  Going by available data, we had 1,827 tigers in 1972 which grew to 4,334 in 1989 and dropped to 3,750 in 1993.  The last tiger census in 2001 claimed that there were 3,642 tigers in the wild. And, now, we have 1,411 tigers. 
 
But, as Peter Jackson pointed out, there might have been more tigers on paper than in the wild.  Whether the cause of this difference was due to inadvertent errors or deliberate inflation of figures to be in the good books of higher-ups, is debatable but matching tigers on paper with those in the wild might be quite a job. 
 
But, if we still have 1,411 tigers in the wild, it is indeed a matter of some satisfaction.  At least, we have proved Peter Jackson’s prediction that the Indian tiger would be extinct by 2002, wrong. 
 
If the tiger population could grow from 1,827 in 1972 to 4,334 in 1989, there is no reason why we cannot manage a repeat performance taking it up from the current population of 1,411 tigers.  All it needs is political will, funding and protection from the government and support from conservationists and indigenous people residing in tiger reserves.
 
It is not as if Project Tiger has entirely been a success story.  Some of the prominent adverse reports came from (1) Ranthambhore in the 1990s where poaching was rampant.  The park officials stopped naming the tigers as visitors wanted to see the tigers they had seen during their last visit and they could not be shown as they were poached during the intervening period; (2) Sariska which lost all the 28 tigers to poachers because of administrative breakdown; (3) Pench which too seems to have lost all its tigers; (4) Corbett National Park which showed remarkable increase in tiger population too lost some tigers in the recent past. (5) Two tiger cubs were poisoned in the periphery of Ranthambhore Tiger Reserve recently.
 
Sariska started afresh with translocation of tigers from Ranthambhore last year.  Dr. Sunayan Sharma, the Director of Sariska Tiger Reserve is happy that he has been able to ensure the safety of these tigers so far.  But, he cautions that we have to be extra careful with our tiger population in 2010 as this happens to be the year of the tiger for the Chinese.
 
We can also draw some comfort from the fact that the tiger-range states in India cover almost two-third of the 28 states. Their adaptability is evident from the fact that they are comfortable in a wide variety of habitats beginning with mangrove forests of Sunderbans in West Bengal to the soaring heights of Namdapha in Arunachal Pradesh to rainforests of Periyar in Kerala to Himalayan foothills of Corbett in Uttaranchal to scrublands of Sariska in Rajasthan and dry deciduous forests in the plains and hillocks of Bandhavgarh in Madhya Pradesh. Tigers are found almost all over India except for the northern most, western most and south eastern parts of India.
 
Unlike the Asiatic lion which is holed up in its last resort in the Gir forest in Gujarat, the tiger cannot be wiped out in one go because they are so spread out.  A robust tiger population can be revived through concerted efforts.
 
Like the tiger, the story of Project Tiger is also striped with successes and failures.  Since poaching and habitat loss are the prime causes for decimation of the Indian tiger, the real success of Project Tiger will depend upon its effectiveness in conserving the habitat and preventing tigers from being converted into tiger products.