Report of the Tiger Task Force - PRS

TIGER TASK FORCE REPORT JOINING THE DOTS ■habitat, but the tiger too needs the people’s habitat.This is the coexistence challenge.Wildlife managers say that the tiger cannot beprotected within the ‘enclaved islands’ that ourreserves have become. In the last tiger ‘census’, morethan half the big cats were found not inside butoutside the tiger reserves. These are lands which thetiger shares with people. But as the forests degrade inthe landscape, the habitat shrinks. The source —areas where the tiger breeds or its natal areas — arethe reserves. The sinks, where the tiger goes to live,lie in the lands outside.This is because the tiger needs territory. Tounderstand conservation of tigers, it is important tounderstand how the tiger lives and mates. The tigersociety revolves around the breeding female, whostarts breeding at three-four years of age in arelatively fixed home range. She has a tenure offive-seven years before she loses her range to avigorous competitor. The adult male tiger has alarger range, overlapping several breeding females— three on an average. In favourable conditions,females give birth to litters of three-four cubs onceevery two-three years. When roughly two years old,the young are abandoned by their mother and theseare known as dispersing transients (floaters) bybiologists. Tigers move 10-15 km per day. Transienttigers can move over hundreds of kilometres insearch of new homes.This gives rise to a double jeopardy: on one hand,the habitat of the tiger shrinks drastically as it cannotmove beyond the park to establish its territory. Onthe other, the resources of people also shrink andthey then exert even more pressure on the tigerreserve.There is, therefore, no choice but to find ways ofcoexistence. If people are not allowed into the tiger’shabitat, they will be even more resentful of thecreatures’ entry into their habitat. This is why tigerpoisoning cases are on the rise. This is why tigers inthe wild will not survive. We must get out of the‘island’ mentality. The tiger’s home is its landscape,wherever it ranges. It is this we have to learn toprotect.How will that be done?There are two essential strategies:1. The habitat must be made inviolate for the tigerwhere it must. It must be shared between thepeople and the tigers in a way that peaceprevails. The poverty of one, otherwise, will bethe destruction of the other.2. The outside forest habitat must be regenerated sothat people can be less dependent on theenclaves of the tiger, and the tiger has more spacein the surrounding landscape to live.All share the forest habitatWe will have to understand why our forests are introuble: this is the real challenge of the tiger crisis. Ifwe work hard, we can protect a few hundred tigers inthe protective islands of our reserves. If we improveour enforcement, we can protect a few more. But ifwe really want to safeguard the future of tigers, wewill have to regenerate our forests.The problem is that we do not know how. In thepast, the State had appropriated forest resources fromlocal communities. Over the years, logging andmining led to rampant degradation. If the Britishstripped the forests of Ratnagiri in coastalMaharashtra to make ships and railway lines,independent India sold its forests for a pittance to thepulp and paper industry. This was the extractivephase of forest use.But in the early 1980s, the State turned trackfrom exploiting natural resources to protecting them.Under the Forest Conservation Act, 1980, only theCentral government had the right to allow forestland to be converted to non-forest purposes (roads,power stations, dams and the like). This was theconservation phase.The rampant diversion of land for developmentstopped, but deforestation continued. So, since the1990s, the Supreme Court has stepped in, imposingchecks on how forests are to be worked. Manydifferent orders aimed at stopping deforestation havebeen issued over these years. In December 1996, theCourt ordered a ban on timber felling, unless theforest department made a working plan for forestedregions demarcating areas that could be logged. In1998, it said that all working plans for all forestdivisions had to be prepared by the stategovernments but approved by the Centre. It hasbanned the transport of logs from the northeasternstates and ordered the closure of all unlicensedsawmills and wood processing plants; states havebeen asked not to allow new ones either.But the tragedy is that while deforestation hasreduced, forest degradation continues.The State of Forest Report 2003 shows that thecountry has lost 26,245 sq km of dense forestsbetween 2001 and 2003. On the other hand, the openforests — forests with a crown density of only 10 to40 per cent — have increased by 29,000 sq km. Thecountry now has 11.88 per cent of its geographicalarea under dense forests, of which only 1.56 per centcould be classified as very dense, with a canopycover of over 70 per cent (see table: Net change inforest cover in the country since 2001 assessment).The problem is that dense forests aredisappearing in the very habitats that we areconcerned with in this report — the habitats of tigersand poor people. According to the State of ForestA paradigm change 25