Report of the Tiger Task Force - PRS

TIGER TASK FORCE REPORT JOINING THE DOTS ■circumstance, it was not a management imperative.In fact, conservation demanded that efforts must gobeyond this issue to identify link corridors andmanagement of forests outside the reserves. It alsoscrutinised issues of personnel as well asadministrative and other facilities. 5This was also the time when WWF-Indiareleased its action plan to save the tiger, enumeratedin The Tiger Call and Tiger ConservationStrategy and Action Plan. The plan focussed on theneed to involve local communities as well asmeasures to improve the anti-poaching enforcementnetwork. 6,7But in the meantime, all hell broke loose: twoUK-based organisations, the Tiger Trust and theEnvironmental Investigation Agency (EIA) releasedThe Big Cat Cover Up 8 and The State of the Tiger 9 ,reports suggesting everything was wrong with theIndian programme for tiger conservation. Theyaccused Indian conservation institutions of playinginto the hands of poachers, and lambasted them forrefusing to accept the need for more armedintervention to save the tiger.The release of these reports was followed by aninternational media campaign on the imminentextinction of the tiger; one newspaper opined that“corruption, complacency and the complicity ofsome communities whose livestock is threatened bythe big cat, has produced a second crisis made morecomplex by money it generates”. 10 The two UK-basedinstitutions demanded radical changes in wildlifeprotection and management in India — stricterenforcement, increased patrolling and sustainedanti-poaching drives. While the Tiger Trustrecommended the creation of rapid response teamsand combat and hunter patrols, EIA wanted morepolitical will. Significantly, neither had anythinggoing for local communities. Some Indianenvironmentalists argued “if concerned people arenot involved at this crisis point, the same flawed —Western conservation — paradigm would continueto be practised in the county”. This approach, theysaid, was eco-fascist. 11 Such efforts have continuedto this day (see box: Agendas to push).In the mid-1990s, those who believed in adifferent paradigm were in a minority. The largereffort turned to damage control. Many criticconservationistswere taken on board as the tigerconservation programme confidently strode towardsits silver anniversary celebrations. The confidenceAgendas to pushOn July 12, 2005, on the eve of the prime minister’s USvisit, the Union ministry of environment and forests(MoEF) received a draft press statement issued by the USdepartment of state. The press release contained a jointagreement to be signed between president George Bushand prime minister Manmohan Singh. The ministry ofexternal affairs needed the comments of the MoEF beforethe statement could be released. The statement wassimple. It said that the “countries would take aggressivenew steps to address the sharp decline in the IndianBengal tiger population.” The US department of statesaid it would “give in 2005 approximately US $4,68,000(Rs 2 crore) through the private ‘Save the Tiger Fund’and the ‘Rhinoceros and Tiger Conservation Fund’. Jointcooperation would also be established for a long-termmonitoring programme.The MoEF replied there was no need for a bilateralagreement at this stage. It stressed that India needed toevaluate its tiger conservation programme in terms of thechallenge of coexistence with local communities. It alsohad already put into place a tiger estimation programme,which was being evaluated by the Tiger Task Force. Itbelieved it could set its own agenda. It would determineits science for tiger counting.But a joint advertisement by the US government’sfish and wildlife service and the Save the Tiger Fund, funded by oil giant Exxon Mobil, was publishedwhen the prime minister was in Washington.The assessment 5