Tiger Conservation in India - Project Tiger

The primary focus of the paper is to analyze the Indian Tiger Conservation program - Project Tiger. The circumstances that lead to and the conditions under which the program was launched are discussed. National Parks in India lead to a situation where the natives of the forest are deprived of their homes and livelihoods as an externality of conservation. These ousted populations ('green oustees') often turn against the National Parks for their sustenance. The first fifteen years of the program showed spectacular rises in tiger populations. Demographic trends of tiger populations in India had peaked around 1987. The method of census - the pugmark method, is far from reliable. Project Tiger suffers from various problems - delayed and inadequate funds, poaching, grazing, encroachment and inadequacy of staff both in training and in numbers. Project Tiger Status Report 2001 acknowledges these issues. There are instances when Project Tiger National Parks receive funds at the end of the financial year due to the long bureaucratic process involved in sanctioning and transfer of funds. This results in the ability of Project Tiger National Parks to utilize all the funds that are allocated to them. The National Parks have inadequately trained and insufficient number of field staff. Special emphasis has been laid on the problem of the delayed delivery of funds. The 'money trail' has been analyzed - no less than seven different Government departments are involved in the process that delivers the funds to the National Parks. These, too, may be involved more than once. The delayed receipt of funds is vitally detrimental to the performance of the parks. The paper gives recommendations for improving the process of sanction and delivery of funds to Project Tiger National Parks. Various players in the Indian case are enumerated. The goal of saving the tiger can, in the long-term, be accomplished better by a shift of the Government's role from keeper to regulator.