THE TROUBLED TIGER
SANJAY SHARMA, BHOPAL
21 - Jan - 05
Poachers are the biggest threat to the survival of the tiger in its natural habitat in Madhya Pradesh," Crusade for Revival of Environment and Wildlife (CREW), an NGO devoted to the cause of environment and wildlife, had warned the State Government in its hard hitting investigative report "The Vanishing Stripes" that was released in the first fortnight of June 1999.
The situation in the tiger state, home to over 30 percent of the Indian tigers, is no better even now. As per the population estimates of 2002, there are 711 tigers and 1,086 panthers in the state. The recent recoveries of the carcass of a tigress and her cub and the remains of a tiger within days of each other are an indicator of the dismal picture. The remains of a tiger killed by poachers inside the Pench National Park were found last week. Only three days prior to it the carcass of a tigress and her cub were found lying just outside the
park and the big cats, in both the cases, are suspected to have been poisoned-a way that has of late emerged as the most convenient for poachers, as it does not damage the skin of the animal.
The Global Environment Facility (Trust) and the World Bank fund the India Ecodevelopment Project initiated in seven selected Project Tiger areas in the country and the Pench project tiger area in Seoni district is one of them. The latest poaching incident surfaced following the arrest of a local, Vijay Singh, with four tiger nails on December 17. The racket has international connections, say officials.
"The primary destination for Indian tiger parts is still China-the main supplier of medicines made from tiger parts," states an Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) report. Japan and South-East Asian countries are also among those where tiger parts fetch good money.
"Poachers employ the services of locals, mostly Pardis, for a paltry sum to get them the animal, each of which in turn fetches them about Rs 15 lakh in the international market," says forest conservator SK Pandey, who is camping in Pench to look into the matter. The forest departments claim that it has made efforts to check the menace does not seem to satisfy conservators, who accuse the forest officials of being negligent towards protecting wildlife for "obvious reasons", the "money factor" being one of them.
"The Wildlife Protection Act needs to be more stringent," says Lalit Shastri, Bureau Chief of The Hindu for Madhya Pradesh and founder chairman of CREW. "The killing of endangered species has continued unabated but convictions have been abysmally low. If endangered species are to be saved the laws to deal with the crime should be made more effective," he asserts.
Since the idea is to save the tiger in its natural surroundings, CREW has been studying factors threatening both the forests and the wildlife. Contesting the official claim of an increase in the tiger population it has questioned the authenticity of the census saying: "They have grounds to believe that poaching, biotic conflict and destruction of habitat have threatened the tiger population in the state in a big way."
According to CREW, poaching of tigers and panthers has become an epidemic in the Bandhavgarh, Panna, Kanha, Satpura and the Pench national parks and also in districts of Hoshangabad, Betul, Raisen, Seoni, Raipur, Raigarh, Vidisha, Sagar, Jabalpur, Katni, Mandla, Chhatarpur, Baiaghat, Shahdol, Chhindwara, Sarguja and Bilaspur. The animal skin and body parts, the NGO says, are being smuggled out of the state mainly through the railheads at Satna, Jabalpur, Itarsi, Jhansi and Sagar.
Their report says that the degradation and exploitation of forests have become a booming enterprise in the state, as punitive action against the crime is negligible. The long list of state personnel killed by poachers while on forest protection duty is another disturbing factor, says CREW. Their report further claims that whenever poaching cases have been registered, only animal skin, bones, jaws and nails have been seized whereas the other vital body parts that fetch a fortune in the international market have been released.
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