Report of the Tiger Task Force - PRS

TIGER TASK FORCE REPORT JOINING THE DOTS ■Dangers of pretending to be exactWildlife managers and biologists were, of course,aware of these possibilities. Several questions havebeen raised and studies undertaken to estimate sucherrors, reduce them to the extent possible, andpropose alternatives 5 . In practice, however, the totalpugmark count with the objective of coming up withone specific exact number continues to be themethod followed in all the official tiger numberestimates to this day.Given the complexity of the real world, anaccurate total count of tigers is simply not feasible. Ifthis is not accepted, and only a single number isprovided as if that is a precise estimate, there is adanger that any lower number arrived at in asubsequent year would be taken to imply that therehas been a definite decline in the number of tigers.For example, there may be an error margin of ±7tigers with 99 per cent probability in some tigerreserve. The estimate arrived at through totalpugmark count in the first year may be 32, whichdeclined to 29 in the second year. In reality, theactual total number may in fact have increased.Moreover, if there were a tendency to judge theperformance of park managers on the basis of thesupposedly exact number of tigers in the area undertheir charge, then the managers would naturally beinclined to manipulate the data and project a pictureof continually increasing numbers. Such a tendencycould be checked if there was in place a system ofpublic scrutiny of the veracity of the numbers beingdeclared. However, no such system has been inoperation — the tendency to manipulate data,therefore, has gone on unchecked.This might have happened in several places. Wenow have concrete evidence that it did happen inSariska, where the publicly declared numbers havebeen decidedly inflated at least over 2001, 2002 and2004. A most unfortunate consequence of thedissemination of such manipulated data has been afailure to recognise the signs of decline in tigernumbers, resulting in their total elimination during2004.It is important to note here that around mid-2002, the Project Tiger directorate had already begunworking on a revised methodology for the assessmentof tiger habitats and numbers. The directorate, in itsnote, assessed the situation: “Over 20 years of seriousefforts and millions of rupees of investment towardspromoting conservation of tigers and theirecosystems, it is rather ironical that we still do nothave a system of evaluating the effectiveness of theseconservation efforts.” 6The directorate then laid out its objectives asfollows:● To assess the habitat and status of tigers in thesub-continent● To develop appropriate (site-specific) census andmonitoring protocols● To develop spatial and aspatial models anddatabase for risk assessment and persistence ofexisting tiger populations● To collate, analyse, store, update anddisseminate this information to decision makersand field managers● To disseminate the census, habitat evaluationand monitoring techniques to field personnel byconducting regional training workshops andproducing manuals● The directorate noted that its ‘Tiger Habitat andPopulation Evaluation System’ would not onlyserve as a monitoring tool for the tiger and itshabitat, but would also serve to monitor theforests, their extent, the threats — in effect, theentire wilderness biodiversity resource for whichthe tiger serves as a flagship.Science: an enterprise of scepticismWe evidently need to put in place a new system ofestimation of the numbers of tigers and the health ofthe ecosystems that harbour them. This new systemshould acknowledge that given the many sources ofvariability in complex natural systems, exactnumbers, such as total pugmark counts, are notfeasible, and that instead we must substitutethese by estimates accompanied by appropriateconfidence limits. But there are more fundamentalissues at stake. We need to acknowledge thatscience is not a matter just of systematic procedures.Rather, it is a system of continual open scrutinyof the procedures being employed towards anygiven objectives, such as estimation of tiger numbers,and of the level of reliability of the resultsthese procedures produce. This system hastraditionally worked through peer review ofpublication of scientific results specifying details ofthe methodology and of primary data as well asanalysis and interpretation. Therefore, manywildlife biologists have rightly pointed out thatthe total pugmark count method has never beenexposed to this test and is consequentlyunacceptable to them. At the same time, they point toa number of alternatives that have been so tested,including the use of camera traps, and hence arepreferable.Peer review in refereed journals is a time-testedsystem that will continue to function. However, it isjust one of the ways of ensuring that scienceprogresses through transparency, by sharing allresults, the methodology employed to arrive at themand the logic followed in the deductions. Sciencealso attempts to eliminate biases that may arisethrough conflicts of interest by devising proceduressuch as double blind trials. It is these democratic,The way ahead 71