Photo: Daanish Shastri.The official All India Tiger Estimation 2014, conducted across India's 47 tiger reserves and their surrounds, is acknowledged to be the largest tiger enumeration exercise ever undertaken in the world. Led by scientists such as Dr. Y.V. Jhala of the Wildlife Institute of India and in coordination with Dr. Ullas Karanth, of the Wildlife Conservation Society-India, an impressive 9,735 camera traps were deployed across a tiger range of 378,000 sq. km. in 17 Indian states. This probably represents 70 per cent of all the wild tigers in the world.
Project Tiger, launched in 1973 was acknowledged by the mid 1980s to be the world's most successful conservation project. However, complacency crept in around 1990, when the Government of India began to rely more on the advice of the World Bank, which shifted the focus away from protection to habitat manipulation and experiments in social engineering that ended up harming both tigers and the communities living around tiger habitats.
The task before India now is to expand, regenerate and protect the buffer lands abutting the best tiger habitats, and the connecting corridors that link tiger reserves, so that dispersing male and female tigers are able to find territories in which to bring up their own families. Equally it is vital that India's planners, politicians and administrators recognise the economic worth of the natural ecosystems that sustain tigers and other wild species because in an era of climate change these are the infrastructures that we will need to secure our peoples' water, food and economic security.
View the estimation report here: Status of Tigers in India, 2014
From Sanctuary's Archives:
A snapshot of India's Tiger Reserves.
Will Narendra Modi's government squander a decade of tiger recovery?
