‘Project Tiger’ was launched on April 1, 1973 to promote tiger conservation and increase the population of the animal at a time when it was rapidly declining in numbers. Launched from the Jim Corbett National Park in Uttarakhand, the project also aimed to preserve areas of biological importance as a national heritage of the country.
Tiger (Panthera tigris) is the National Animal of India. It is an umbrella species necessary to ensure viable populations of other wild animals in the forests and the ecological viability of the entire habitat including its water resources and climate security.
About the Project
The centrally-sponsored Project Tiger of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) provides central assistance to the tiger range states for conserving the tiger population in designated tiger reserves, which are also conservation areas with little human presence.
The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), a statutory body of the MoEFCC, formed in 2005 as per the recommendations of the Tiger Task Force, is the administering body for the project. The NTCA performs its functions under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972.
In India, the tiger population drastically began reducing in the 19th century. From a population of 20,000–40,000, the number dropped to about 1,820 in the 1970s due to large-scale hunting and poaching activities and the increasing scarcity of prey for the animals.
Conservation of tigers started with the first phase in the 1970s when the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972 was enacted. Protected areas were set up to conserve tigers and their forest ecosystems. As the trade in tiger parts continued to decimate their numbers in the 1980s, leading to the extinction of tigers in the Sariska Tiger Reserve, Rajasthan, the second phase was launched in 2005–06, with the government adopting a landscape-level approach involving strict monitoring of the reserves.
From covering nine tiger reserves in Assam, Bihar, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal over an area of approximately 18,278 sq. km initially, the project covered 53 tiger reserves spread out over 18 tiger range states amounting to over 75,796 sq. km (some 2.23 per cent of the geographical area of India) as of 2023.
The Jim Corbett National Park in Nainital (Uttarakhand) and the Bandipur Tiger Reserve (Karnataka) were the first tiger reserves to be set up in India, in 1973. The Ramgarh Vishdhari Wildlife Sanctuary, (Rajasthan) was declared as the 52nd tiger reserve in 2022 and the Ranipur Wildlife Sanctuary, Chitrakoot district (the third tiger reserve in Uttar Pradesh) is declared as the 53rd tiger reserve in October 2022, according to the NTCA.
Objectives and Activities
Project Tiger identifies factors that adversely affect tiger habitats and mitigates them through suitable management practices to preserve and manage the habitats in their ecological purity. A viable tiger population is to be maintained for emphasising their economic, ecological, cultural, and aesthetic significance based on a scientifically calculated carrying capacity of habitats while ensuring a balance between development and wildlife conservation.
Project Tiger has involved all sectors of the society in an effort to combat poaching and other crimes in the reserves. The damage done to the habitats is addressed to allow the ecosystem as a whole to recover.
The project conducts tiger census in the country at intervals.
Tiger monitoring under Project Tiger has resulted in major changes in tiger population management including the announcement of new tiger reserves, designation, and notification of core and buffer areas in reserves, recognition of tiger landscapes and tiger corridors, emphasis on integrating tiger conservation with development, reintroduction and supplementation strategies for tigers and ungulates, and ensuring that investments in conservation cover vulnerable gene pools.
Project Tiger has an exclusive tiger conservation agenda in the core areas of tiger reserves which bear the legal status of a national park or a sanctuary. A people-inclusive approach has been adopted in the buffer areas constituting forest as well as non-forest lands managed for multiple uses. In its 50 years of existence, the project has been working towards eliminating all human activities from the core areas; in the buffer areas, it is working towards minimising tiger-human conflicts. The states maintain a Special Tiger Protection Force to protect tigers in the reserves.
The project makes extensive use of sophisticated technologies to keep an account of the tiger population and maintain the habitat. Instead of relying largely on pugmarks and other signs of tigers used earlier (until 2004), it uses camera traps and geographical information system (GIS) that provide high-quality crucial data and information about animal populations, behaviour, and forest habitats.
Project Tiger also launched an e-Eye system in 2016 at the Corbett National Park that uses thermal cameras for enhanced surveillance.
Moreover, the Monitoring System for Tigers-Intensive Protection and Ecological Status (M-STrIPES)—launched in 2010—uses a software-based monitoring system for tigers. The program uses global positioning system (GPS) and remote sensing to collect field data, create a database using IT tools and analyse the information using GIS and statistical tools to help in the management of tiger reserves.
Tiger surveys Since 2006, the NTCA has partnered with the Wildlife Institute of India and various state forest departments to count India’s tigers every four years combining data from camera-trap-based surveys and sign surveys. Five estimation surveys had been conducted till 2022, with the fourth All India Tiger Estimation Survey in 2018 finding a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest camera trap wildlife survey ever.
For the tiger census, a camera trap-based ‘capture-mark-recapture’ approach is used to calculate the abundance and density of the animal through sampling. The Wildlife Institute of India’s Tiger Cell has a laboratory equipped with workstations that process the amount of data received. GPS locations are checked and photographs geotagged or paired with accurate locations to track poaching by matching recovered skins with those of individual tigers in the national database of individual tigers. Artificial intelligence-based segregation of images into various categories and identification of individual tigers is followed by a manual checking of the data for errors and verifying it.
Overall, the project has been successful in increasing the number of tigers in India. As per the Status of Tigers 2022 report, released in April 2023, the tiger population gradually increased from 1,411 in 2006 to 2,967 in 2018 occupying an area of 88,985 sq. km; the number of tigers went up by 6.74 per cent to 3,167 in 2022.
Wildlife research has been undertaken under the project for faunal and floral assessment of the tiger habitats and monitoring changes in this regard.
The project has benefitted the local people by generating more than 45 lakh man-days of employment annually. The government supports eco-development committees and self-help groups to promote their socio-economic development.
Issues of Concern
India, today, has around 75 per cent of the world’s wild tigers. Though Project Tiger has been a success overall, it has failed to address certain prevailing concerns.
There is an overpopulation of tigers now, with many reserves reaching their carrying capacity and running out of space to host the big cats. The animals are, therefore, increasingly coming into conflict with humans, attacking domestic animals and people. At the same time, the rise in the number of tiger has been skewed region-wise: tiger populations in protected areas like the Western Ghats landscape of southern India may be stable or increasing, but outside these reserves where an estimated 30 per cent of India’s tigers live (such as the forests of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Assam, Odisha, Arunachal Pradesh, and Mizoram), there has been lack of serious conservation efforts to help tiger population recovery.
Conservation efforts cannot be successful when the overall tiger occupancy in a larger landscape, or across India, is decreasing.
The overemphasis on tigers has led to scarcity of funds and resources for conservation of other endangered species (the desert fox, desert cat, striped hyena, the Indian wolf, the critically endangered Chinese pangolin, and the great Indian bustard) and forest-dwelling human communities.
Poaching as a threat still persists in the reserves. Though the NTCA, the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau, the state forest departments, and the MoEFCC have collaborated to curb poaching over the years, the existing gaps in transboundary information sharing between India and its neighbours have hampered success.
There has been diversion of land for development as the political will to maintain large areas under forest cover comes in sharp conflict with development projects worth crores.
According to a study published in 2021 by the Legal Initiative for Forest and Environment, the Standing Committee of the National Board of Wildlife (NBWL) had approved 1,385.34 ha land diversion in the first half of 2021 of which some 780.24 ha was from tiger habitats (for linear infrastructure and hydropower projects) and about 302.89 ha was from protected areas. In some areas like Uttarakhand’s Rajaji National Park, the 2022 Status of Tigers Report says that linear infrastructure projects like highways in the congested corridors have left the area functionally extinct for large carnivores and movement of elephants.
Indigenous people continue to pay the price of conservation under Project Tiger. Promises of relocation of people removed from the reserves have yet to bear fruit: out of 751 villages in critical tiger habitats identified for relocation, only 177 had been relocated since 1972 (data for MoEFCC). Though the voluntary relocation of people was to involve only the identified core or critical habitats of a tiger reserve, people have been removed from buffer areas as well.
Exploring Solutions
A temporary solution is translocation of the animals from reserves with high tiger population to those which have a low tiger count. This will help reduce overcrowding in the tiger reserves and ensure that there is a diverse gene pool which is important for species’ survival.
Researchers advocate a new approach that would consider conservation of other species as well as the rights of forest communities as part of the conservation strategy.
The government needs to explore concepts like that of community conserved areas (CCAs) that move beyond the state-controlled protected area model and allow local people rights while conserving animals and ecosystems. The Mishmis, an ethnic group of the Dibang Valley, Arunachal Pradesh, for instance, have been protecting their forest under a community conservation model, which has benefitted the habitat and the animals therein even while allowing the locals access to the forests.
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