Rising numbers make coexistence with humans difficult. FIFTY years after Project Tiger, which was rolled out with the aim of reversing the sharp decline in the population of the big cat, the country’s Tiger Census has thrown up encouraging results. The tiger numbers have appreciably grown from 2,967 in 2018 to 3,167 in 2022. The consistent upward graph — from 1,411 in 2006 and 1,706 in 2010 to 2,226 in 2014 — points to the conservation efforts being on track. India is now, proudly, home to 75 per cent of the world’s tigers. The programme was necessitated as widespread hunting and poaching as well as drastic destruction of the habitat had caused the tiger population to rapidly dwindle from 40,000 in 1947 to 1,800 in 1972. To bring back the tiger — and other endangered animals — from the precipice of extinction, the Wildlife Protection Act 1972 was promulgated along with laws to protect forests and rights of indigenous tribals. Nine tiger reserves across the country were set up, covering 14,000 sq km. Today, the area of the ecosystem facilitating the thriving of wildlife and flora has, notably, swelled to 75,000 sq km. However, it has been observed that this expansion has come at the cost of the man-animal conflict, especially in the Western Ghats and the North-East due to habitat loss, fragmentation and poaching over the years. The forest reserves have limited tiger-carrying capacities, — they can support up to only a certain number of tigers; crossing that figure means that the cats come out for prey, leading to conflict with humans. The ground reality in Kerala, entailing increasing encounters of men with tigers, besides elephants and other mega herbivores, exemplifies the dangers of disrupting the ecology. The future plan, thus, necessitates the linkage of sanctuaries that have crossed the carrying capacity with those that are underpopulated so that the tigers could move from one protected area to the other unhindered. The reserves being far apart, it would entail land acquisition and compensation to the people uprooted. There is also a need to develop habitats with a prey base around the small populations of tigers sighted in newer jungles of Himachal Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh to enable them to flourish.
