40% of India’s tigers are outside protected areas

Around 35%-40% of tigers in India live outside the protected areas, but their movement could get restricted as many wildlife corridors are in a bad condition, said the Wildlife Institute of India (WII).

Updated on: Sep 19, 2015, 08:11:34 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Around 35%-40% of tigers in India live outside the protected areas, but their movement could get restricted as many wildlife corridors are in a bad condition, said the Wildlife Institute of India (WII).

The computation of big cat population inside and outside the reserves was a part of the 2014 tiger estimation that found 2,226 tigers in 92,000 sq km as compared to 81,000 sq km in 2010.

In Maharashtra, 74 of the 170 tigers are outside protected regions. They were found in new areas around the Todaba and Pench reserves, leading to an increase in man-animal conflict. According to the WII, connectivity between wildlife corridors in the state was threatened by infrastructure development, plantations and industrialisation.

Similarly in Karnataka, around 38% of the 406 tigers are estimated to be in the fringe and buffer zones of protected areas. The impact could be visible in Nagarhole tiger reserves, where at least five incidents of tigers attacking cattle in nearby villages have been reported. However, the WII applauded relocation of villages that has led to an improvement in tiger habitat.

The WII also added that tiger populations in high humandominated areas, as seen around Tadoba and Bor in Maharashtra, Uttarakhand’s Corbett National Park, Rajasthan’s Ranthambore and Madhya Pradesh’s Bandhavgarh, has increased human tiger conflict.

Corbett also has a sizeable population outside the core area — in recent years, this has led to a tiger’s killing. State government officials said CCTV cameras, called ‘eye in the sky’, have been set up around fringe areas to monitor the tiger population moving out of the core area.

Ullas K Karanth of the Wildlife Conservation Society argued for the revival of green corridors that make movement easier for tigers from high-density habitats to lesser ones.

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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