The world’s largest tiger census — to track how many of the species are in this country — has come up with good news: the number has gone up to 1,706, indicating a 12 per cent increase in the tiger population in the past three years.
Minister of state for environment and forests Jairam Ramesh, while releasing the report, highlighted the areas where the tiger population has registered an increase: the Terai belt of the Himalayan foothills and Maharashtra.
“But the single largest concentration of tigers in the world is now to be found in the triangle of Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Karnataka shows the highest figures of 320 estimated tigers, and India today has 60 per cent of the world’s tigers,” the minister said.
The 2006 tiger census had shown a sharp decline in the number of tigers in India, putting their number at 1,411.
The latest census indicates that the Shivalik-Gangetic plains have 353 tigers, central India and the Eastern Ghats 601 tigers, the Western Ghats have 534, the northeastern hills and the Brahmaputra flood plains 148 asnd the Sunderbans have 70 tigers.
“The most positive news has been reported from the Naxalite-affected Nagarjuna Sager Tiger Reserve in Andhra Pradesh, where the number of tigers has gone up to 60,” he said.
Other Naxalite-affected reserves such as Indravati in Chhattisgarh, Simplipal in Orissa, Valmiki in Bihar and Palamau in Jharkhand have shown some increase, though he regretted that tiger populations had fallen in central India, particularly in northern Andhra Pradesh and parts of Madhya Pradesh.
Giving details of this mammoth exercise, Dr Y.V. Jhala of the Wildlife Institute of India spelt out how three phases of the tiger estimation procedure had included field data collected at the beat level by trained personnel. The second phase was analysis of the habitat status of tiger forests using satellite data, and the third phase dealt with camera trapping — which helped identify individual tigers on the basis of their unique striped patterns.
“Camera trapping was carried out by teams of wildlife biologists and local forest personnel with more than 476,000 forest personnel involved in data collection. Just to collect the 30,000 forest beats sample required them to walk a distance of 625,000 km. More than 27,300 man days of researchers took part in this process, with 800 camera traps covering an area of 10,500 sq km,” Dr Jhala said.
A delighted Mr Ramesh said 615 individual pictures of tigers were taken through this trapping exercise. While some sanctuaries, including Corbett and Ranthambore, are hitting the limit of their capacity, those in the northeast remained below the carrying capacity levels.
The minister warned that close to 30 per cent of the tiger population was outside the tiger reserves. “We spend all our time and energy on the 39 tiger reserves, but we don’t have a strategy to deal with tigers outside these reserves,” he said.
Mr Ramesh also feared that tiger corridors were under a major threat. “There is a decrease in the tiger occupancy area, which means tiger corridors are under threat. We need better corridor management and better forest management. The challenges are not just from poaching, but from development itself,” he added.
The 2010 census was released at the International Tiger Conference in collaboration with the Global Tiger Forum and the World Bank’s Tiger Initiative.