There’s a tiger in your UID queue

After India’s citizens, it is the turn of the country’s tigers to get unique identification (UID) numbers.

Updated on: Dec 23, 2012, 01:34:04 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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After India’s citizens, it is the turn of the country’s tigers to get unique identification (UID) numbers.

The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) will issue UIDs to around 650 tigers — about one-third of the population — in the first phase starting early January. It believes this will provide “immense assistance” to the protection and monitoring of the big cats, which continue to be hunted and displaced.

The UIDs will be based on photographs captured on camera traps — cameras with infrared sensors that take pictures when they sense movement — as each tiger has a pattern that is unique to it, much like fingerprints for humans. The NTCA has prescribed two photographs showing both sides of the animal’s body.

“A national repository of camera trap photographs of tigers with UIDs will provide instant sharing of information with states and other participants,” the NTCA said in a concept note.

The UID will provide details such as location and other demographics.

An NTCA official said each ID will be linked to five major tiger landscapes in India.

The authority has also developed a software, ExtractCompare, to perform batch-level automated matching and to assign UIDs, the note said.

The current monitoring practice is for forest departments to assign numbers to each tiger. But, a tiger in Kanha reserve may be named T-2 and another in neighbouring Bandhavgarh may have the same number. "It makes monitoring difficult," an NTCA official said.

This year has seen 83 tiger deaths, the most since 1997 despite higher spending on protection. There are currently 1,706 tigers across 41 reserves.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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