| Q |
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| What is the recent development? |
- According to the latest count released by the World Wildlife Fund and the Global Tiger Forum, over 600 tigers have been added to the global number of some 3,200 in estimation of 2010.
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| Significance of the report? |
- In a world facing tremendous pressure on space and resources, a rise in the number of wild tigers is cause for cheer.
- Any credible estimate of growth in their population indicates that a good conservation policy has been at work.
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| View of critics on the findings? |
- Yet, determining the health of an elusive species across countries using absolute numbers is a flawed approach, because it risks shifting the focus away from the health of core populations that persist in a small area of individual countries.
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| What is India doing to conserve tigers? |
- There are wildlife reserves in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odessa, Assam, West Bengal and Jharkhand where the Environment Ministry wants to improve conditions for tiger breeding.
- As part of this exercise, Rs.380 crore has been made available to Project Tiger this year.
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| How many tigers are in India? |
- The 2010 National Tiger Assessment estimated the total population of tigers in India as 1,706.
- As per Ministry of Environment and Forests, the tiger population in India stood at 2,226 in 2014, with an increase of 30.5% since the 2010 estimate.
- This exhaustive study indicated that better protected tiger source sites, especially tiger reserves, have maintained viable populations. However, the area occupied by tigers outside protected areas has decreased considerably. This demonstrates the need for corridors for tigers to move between source sites.
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| What are the challenges in tiger conservation? |
- What is conspicuous, however, is the lack of political will to remove industrial pressures on forests.
- The proposal to widen National Highway 7 in Central India, for instance, has become controversial because of the dreadful impact it would have on tigers in the Kanha-Pench and Kanha-Nagzira corridors in Maharashtra.
- It is contradictory to talk of protecting source populations which occupy only 6% of the habitat on the one hand, and simultaneously engage in destructive activities in the same forests.
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| What should be done to conserve the tigers? |
- In the future, wild tigers will survive if countries can maintain inviolate core habitats for breeding population, ensure habitat connectivity for genetic exchange and crack down on poaching of both tigers and prey.
- The Environment Ministry must also view independent scientific organisations as partners, and stop putting up bureaucratic hurdles to research in protected areas. Effective conservation demands transparency.
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