India’s Project Tiger & its Success

Over the past century the number of tigers in India has fallen from about 40,000 to less than 4,000. If the tigers go extinct, the entire system would collapse. For e.g. when the Dodos went extinct in Mauritius, one species of Acacia tree stopped regenerating completely.

However the news is not all bad. Research states that if protected and given sufficient access to abundant prey, tiger populations can quickly stabilize. Tiger conservation efforts are needed if we want to give these animals a shot at having a sustainable future.

With India's large network of protected areas and continued funding from conservation groups like the Wildlife Conservation Society, they can be provided a safe haven.

The National Tiger Conservation Authority of India (formerly known as Project Tiger) has done a lot to protect tiger habitat in India, and to try halt the many forces edging the tiger closer to extinction, such as poaching.

The estimate for 2018 of tigers’ population was announced on July 29, 2019.
While announced with sufficient fanfare the estimate of 2,967 tigers (up from 1411 in 2006), the target of doubling tiger numbers in India was achieved four years earlier than promised.

India is the beacon of tiger conservation. It has invested 369 crore rupees (US$49.4 million) in tiger conservation, including relocating villages outside protected areas and built the world’s largest animal underpass to funnel tigers safely beneath a highway.

THE BEGINNING

India was facing a huge challenge in the conservation of Tiger, with only 1200 Tigers left in the wild, It was a great threat to these majestic Big Cat. Project Tiger in India was launched on 1st April 1973 as a major wildlife conservation project in India. It was launched from the Jim Corbett National Park of Uttarakhand. The project was given the complete control of nine major national parks in 1973. Today, Project Tiger controls 50 tiger reserves which spread across 72,749 sq. km. of green cover in an effort to conserve the population of the Tiger.

Bonuses generated by the Project Tiger

• Employment
  • Starting from building national parks to handling it, every aspect of it generated employment. When the grounds were converted into national parks builders, architects and general labourers got work. After the work was done and the wildlife was settled, the national parks required management. There is a conservation team for every state.
  • To make people aware about the existence of the Project Tiger and to make them realise the importance of the problem, a marketing team was hired.
  • The breeding of the animals is done by the experts. This part of the job is ever increasing due to the spread of the project. They make sure that all the facilities, species and everything is proper for the breeding of the tigers.
  • The most significant job that gets majority profit is the tourism industry. With national parks exceeding and rare animals being conserved, tourists visit the place often. The national parks have started to keep an entry fee and also have safaris for extra income. The local guides are getting more opportunities to do their jobs.
• Protection of Endangered Species
  • After seeing the success of Project Tiger, the government updated the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972. This made sure that along with tigers, other wildlife also gets protected. One by one, every national park took an initiative to save endangered species. For, e.g.: Gir conserves lions, and Kaziranga conserves one-horned rhinos.
  • As hunting was banned to save tigers, other animals were also saved from the brutal clutches of the game. Eventually, the population of many animals started increasing. Tiger reserves also have various other animals. So along with the tigers, even they are conserved.

How are the tigers counted?

The four-yearly survey is a gargantuan effort. The 2018 one covered 381,400 square kilometres and amounted to nearly 594,000 human-days of work. It logged 35 million photographs taken with hidden motion-triggered cameras, yielding almost 25000 images of tigers everyday.

Every four years, an army of forest guards, conservationists and volunteers fan out over an area roughly the size of Japan and carry out a comprehensive census. It’s a difficult task because tigers are elusive. 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.

Conclusion

Given the vast areas under their control, forest guards still haven't snuffed out poaching completely, though undoubtedly the situation is under much better control inside the reserves. But despite the problems which still face India's diverse wildlife, Project Tiger has injected a new lease of life.

When the umbra of night falls daily on the subcontinent and darkness is swallowing the land as somewhere, an elephant still stomps its foot and the snorting of a deer warns all those who care to listen that the tiger is around.