Poacher menace shadow on tiger conservation

An analysis of 40 years of data shows that poachers, who kill the tiger for its skin and body parts, are moving to less-protected tiger habitats in south and central India, using trains to smuggle their booty out.

Updated on: Oct 19, 2014, 02:06:39 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

There’s bad news for lovers of the majestic tiger, India’s national animal: Poachers are staying ahead of efforts to save the big cats.

An analysis of 40 years of data shows that poachers, who kill the tiger for its skin and body parts, are moving to less-protected tiger habitats in south and central India, using trains to smuggle their booty out.

This could explain why 2013 was a bad year for tiger protection, with 43 killings, and why officials say the period since 2009 has been worrying. Things had been going fairly well until then; in fact, tiger poaching incidents have still more than halved in the 2004-2013 decade from the previous one, to 326 killings.

The study, led by independent wildlife scientist Koustubh Sharma and published in an international journal recently, found that new wildlife trade centres have emerged in southern Indian cities of Coimbatore, Chikmagalur, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Idukki and Mysore. Poaching incidents fell in northern India between 2005-2012 and increased in the central and southern states, it said.

This is a bitter blow for the protection effort, in which hundreds of crores of Rupees were invested after the big cats vanished from Sariska in Rajasthan and Panna in Madhya Pradesh.

Tiger reserves in Kerala, Karnataka and southern Maharashtra, which were not on radar of wildlife syndicates till 1996, started reporting poaching incidents in the last decade. Poachers may have been drawn by less scrutiny at these reserves and reports of a high tiger population.

“We have asked all state governments to set up tiger protection force in their states. We would be providing adequate funding for protecting tigers,” environment minister Prakash Javadekar said on Friday, admitting that the poaching threat was still very real.

Most of these 73 hotspots had an interesting connection — they are on the Indian Railways network.

“Districts closer to rail routes had a lesser probability of discontinuation of tiger crime as opposed those further away,” the study said.

Poaching and hunting have wiped out more than 90% of the tigers across India in the last century or so with just 1,706 tigers remaining in 47 tiger 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

Check India news real-time updates, latest news on Hindustan Times and more across India.