Dr. Anish Andheria
President and CEO, Wildlife Conservation Trust
It was 9.30 a.m. in May 2022, and the forest had already gone silent under the overpowering blaze of the sun. Just as our vehicle drove up a small but steep slope, leading to a large dike that encircled a medium-sized pool of water, I noticed a movement – it was a sub-adult male tiger about to settle down in a shaded patch smack in the middle of the dike. He glanced cursorily at our vehicle before looking away. After a five-minute grooming session, he stood up, stretched, and began walking along the dike away from us. Within moments we noticed an adult gaur, about 80 m. away, staring at the tiger, which glanced nonchalantly at the largest wild ox in the world, before continuing on his path, acting as if the gaur didn’t exist. The gaur was equally unconcerned, but did not look away from the large cat. When the distance between the two reduced to under 25 m., the tiger descended along the inner slope of the dike, skirted around the opposite bank, and sat on a damp patch close to the water. Unable any longer to keep his eye on the tiger, the gaur turned unhurriedly and disappeared into the undergrowth.
Tigers seldom stray far from perennial water sources. Unlike most cats, water is much more to a tiger than a mere thirst-quenching substance. During summers they often enter the water to cool off, just like this adult male. Not surprisingly, the tiger is called the ‘striped water god’. Photo: Dr. Anish Andheria.
I have often witnessed encounters between these two large mammals, but this was different in that both predator and prey displayed a respectful fearlessness towards each other. We humans tend to anticipate drama whenever the two meet, but for them, it is a routine affair, particularly at waterbodies.
I spend much of my life in the wilds that I live to protect, and that morning I was on a drive through the incredible Satpura Tiger Reserve’s Churna Range in Madhya Pradesh with my family. I chose to head for the waterhole, knowing fully well that the tiger is unique among most cats in its relationship with water, especially during the hottest part of a summer day.
A face off between the largest cat and the most formidable bovine on earth. The density of tigers is highly dependent on the density of large herbivores. While sambar and chital form a staple diet of the tiger in India, gaur too are taken if an opportunity presents itself. After all, an adult gaur kill can last for five to six days for a family of four – a tigress and three 15-20 month old cubs. Photo: Dr. Anish Andheria.
The Satpura Tiger Reserve is the rising star of the Great Indian Conservation Story. Less than a decade ago, this beautiful 2,000 sq. km. tiger reserve was overrun by communities struggling to make ends meet. While there were over 55 villages inside the core, the first systematic tiger estimation exercise carried out by the Wildlife Conservation Trust revealed under 20 adult tigers. That spelt a density of under one tiger per 100 sq. km.
Today, however, a vast majority of those villages have chosen, actually petitioned, to be assisted in moving out of Satpura, largely because the ambitions of the younger generation have changed. Also because, surrounded by herbivores and overwhelmed by plant-eating insects, they routinely lost a large percentage of their crop. Their livestock too was constantly at risk from predators, and neither schools nor medical facilities were on tap.
When the villages eventually moved out, agricultural fields were almost magically transformed into grasslands through management inputs, village ponds served as secluded water sources for wild species, and forest fires – that used to be set to facilitate mahua flower and tendu leaf collection – reduced drastically. As anticipated, wild prey populations bounced back as anthropogenic pressures went down. Livestock no longer competed with wild herbivores for fodder and with the rise of deer, gaur, monkey and wild pig numbers, tiger numbers rose too. What is more, with enhanced vegetative cover, water regimes and soil moisture improved, as did the health of soil organisms.
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Today, the Satpura Tiger Reserve supports over 50 adult tigers and upon reaching adulthood, young tigers have begun to migrate via forested corridors to other tiger source populations such as Pench in Madhya Pradesh and Melghat in Maharashtra. Such relatively quick turnarounds are not rare in India. Over the past two decades, several sub-optimal tiger habitats have bounced back with just the right kind of nudge from State Forest Departments and the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA).
The tiger was purposefully chosen as a symbol for landscape-scale conservation as it is long ranging, adapted to different habitat types and sits at the apex of its food chain. The tiger cannot be conserved without first safeguarding a sufficiently large area. And when that happens, innumerable small and large species end up being protected. This cat snake, and the Cnemaspis gecko, were unknown to science when the author photographed them in 2017 in Tamil Nadu’s Kalakkad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve. Photo: Dr. Anish Andheria.
According to the All-India Tiger Estimation 2022, India has once again proved that it is unique in many ways. Many conservationists and scientists had written off the tiger in the late 1990s – they strongly believed that the world’s largest cat might not live to see the 21st Century. Three decades later, however, India can take justifiable pride in the fact that tigers have not only survived, but have seen a measurable population rise. With good reason, Project Tiger, considered to be the world’s most successful conservation and rewilding programme of its kind in the 1980s, still has bragging rights! Even as the populations of Panthera tigris declined in most of the 13 tiger range countries, India managed to set aside relatively large forested lands to protect the striped predator. From nine tiger reserves in 1973, we now have 53, with more in the pipeline. Official government records confirm that the tiger population more than doubled from an estimated 1,411 in 2006 to 3,167 in 2022. India also set aside around 75,800 sq. km. of land to safeguard tigers and their prey, and these habitats in turn served to protect the vital catchment areas of over 300 rivers. What is more, as outlined by the late Kailash Sankhala, the first Director of Project Tiger when the ambitious rewilding initiative was launched at the hands of Dr. Karan Singh (erstwhile prince regent of Jammu and Kashmir) and the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1973, innumerable life-forms that share the tigers’ habitat also flourished.
While this is all very well, it is important to note that 75 per cent of all of India’s tigers exist in just six out of 18 tiger states. These are Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Uttarakhand, Maharashtra, Assam, and Tamil Nadu. Three others – Kerala, Rajasthan and West Bengal, have had what might be called intermediate success in terms of securing their tiger habitats to join the ‘Tiger Club of Six’. As for the remaining nine states, Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Mizoram, Odisha, Telangana, and Uttar Pradesh, they must unfortunately be labelled as consistent underperformers.
The tiger was purposefully chosen as a symbol for landscape-scale conservation as it is long ranging, adapted to different habitat types and sits at the apex of its food chain. The tiger cannot be conserved without first safeguarding a sufficiently large area. And when that happens, innumerable small and large species end up being protected. This cat snake, and the Cnemaspis gecko, were unknown to science when the author photographed them in 2017 in Tamil Nadu’s Kalakkad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve. Photo: Dr. Anish Andheria.
Much has been achieved for tigers in the past 50 years. India has fared far better than most other tiger-bearing nations. However, climate change and a rapid rate of development, involving roads, dams, canals, mines and more, are poised to throw up graver challenges in the near future. Unless policy makers accept that natural ecosystems are in themselves infrastructures with vastly greater economic value than currently estimated, heavy human footprints, including urbanisation, will place tremendous stress on the last-remaining tiger habitats.
The Management Effectiveness Evaluation (MEE), carried out by the NTCA every four years, has highlighted glaring disparities in the conservation efforts invested by different states, and often between tiger reserves within the same state. We must accept that India has failed to implement a uniform conservation strategy across the country. That certain states have continued to underperform despite several MEE cycles, highlights non-compliance of NTCA’s recommendations. Madhya Pradesh, for instance, performs well consistently, while neighbouring Chhattisgarh is a serial underperformer. But these are not insurmountable problems and Project Tiger has shown how, left to its own devices, nature virtually conspires to heal itself.
Tiger densities are a good reflection of the quality of management of a habitat, with a steady drop in density indicating habitat deterioration, which in turn impacts biodiversity, hydrology and carbon sequestration. India’s agro-economists are clearly at fault for undervaluing the contribution of natural ecosystems to our food security. More than most other problems, this is what has led to the degradation of farmlands. Poor land management and the indiscriminate use of chemicals have poisoned groundwater and destroyed soil organisms, without which farmlands have lost their fertility.
A tigress from Assam’s Orang Tiger Reserve walks through a dry paddy field as farm workers and villagers watch her while shooting mobile camera images. With over 60 per cent of India’s population engaged in farming, or being directly farm-dependent, it is imperative that we have systems in place that directly benefit local communities so that farmers are not forced to pay the price of India’s ecological successes. Photo: Nejib Ahmed/Sanctuary Photolibrary.
For instance, with over 60 per cent of India’s population engaged in farming, or being directly farm-dependent, a drop in surface water at the hands of ecosystem degradation would have a devastating impact on farmers and farm production. Inequities have thus left the most marginalised sections of society out on a limb. This has forced them into an increased dependence on forest wood, minor forest produce and bushmeat at such unsustainable levels as to further degrade the very ecosystems that gave rise to our great cultures.
Adding climate change impacts to this undesirable state of affairs, in an already overpopulated India, renders the task of rebuilding and rewilding the Indian subcontinent far more difficult and expensive than it should have been.
To make matters worse, the vicious cycle of debt and poverty leads to the collapse of several relict ecosystems including grasslands, wetlands, mangroves, sandbanks, lakes and rivers. The resultant loss of water quality and soil fertility forces large numbers of people to migrate out of their natal areas, eventually impacting the social fabric of the nation, disrupting family bonds and community ties, exacerbating poverty, sparking social tensions and giving rise to acute law-and-order situations.
Clearly, the issue here is not environment vs. development, but short term vs. long term economics!
Forest watchers battle a raging fire without firefighting equipment in Madhya Pradesh’s Kanha Tiger Reserve. This invisible, yet grossly under-supported task force is key to India’s ability to survive the climate catastrophe hanging over us like a sword of Damocles. If we allow them to become demotivated, it will not be our borders from where existential threats will jump out at us, the threat will come from within. Photo: Nilesh Shah/Sanctuary Photolibrary.
On the 50th anniversary of Project Tiger, when I look back in time and relive the successes and failures of arguably one of the most successful climate change mitigation movements on the planet, there are many learnings. Some efforts have paid off, some have not. Several old challenges such as organised wildlife poaching have somewhat dwindled, others, such as human-wildlife conflict have become more acute. Conservation challenges have intensified. The knowledge base of conservation biologists, social scientists, park managers, and policy makers has risen dramatically. But are we willing to ditch ephemeral, short-term gains for lasting ecological, water, food, social and economic security?
The Parsa east and Kente Basan open-cast mine – a highly destructive scar on the landscape – was allocated to the state-owned Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Limited and then handed over to Adani Enterprises to develop and operate. This mine is one of 23 coal blocks that make up the controversial Hasdeo Arand Coal Field in northern Chhattisgarh. Photo: Pranav Capila.
Not in the order of priority, here are some action points that we will need to act on to address future threats:
1) Leave Protected Areas and their eco-sensitive zones alone. No compromise on this one… because they are our best insurance against climate change. By the same token, we must find innovative, just ways to restore and rewild degraded habitats.
2) Bypass biodiverse ecosystems for linear projects, because fragmenting them will hurt our water, food, social, economic and climate security. In rare cases, mitigation structures may be relied upon without trumping ecological priorities with financial considerations.
3) Create mass employment in rural India, by putting our people to work to restore the catchment areas of our over 3,000 large dams through labour-intensive soil and moisture conservation works. This would bring atmospheric carbon down, enhance biodiversity, reduce siltation into reservoirs, and temper floods and droughts. Even the most cynical agro-economists will agree that food production would rise and the tragic number of farmer suicides would fall.
4) In India, the fate of the tiger is in the hands of the States where it survives. Too many Tiger States have failed Panthera tigris. Apart from the headline points listed above, clearly the underperforming states need to walk the extra mile if we are even to begin initiating a turnaround. To begin with, our foot soldiers need to be paid at par with other sectors that have been prioritised purely on economic grounds. They also need to be upskilled and respected, and pending vacancies filled. Eventually, economists must internalise the fact that every sector, financial or social, is ultimately going to be dependent on the health of our natural ecosystems. As the national news begins to focus on record summer heat waves, it is our forest watchers, guards and field officers who will be fighting the forest fires that will undoubtedly rage. This invisible task force is key to India’s ability to survive the climate catastrophe hanging over us like a sword of Damocles. If we demotivate them, it will not be our borders from where existential threats jump at us, it will be from within.
5) By policy, enable those living in close proximity to biodiverse ecosystems to be the primary beneficiaries of biodiversity regeneration. The tourism sector provided 79.86 million direct and indirect jobs in the financial year 2019-20, according to the government’s 3rd Tourism Satellite Account, and is a major contributor to India’s Foreign Exchange Earning.
The strategy is straightforward. While keeping the germplasm in our Protected Area Network sacrosanct, it is vital that local communities stop looking upon wild species as Yamdoots (Grim Reapers) and recognise them as Annadatas (Providers of Sustenance).
Tiger conservation is synonymous with habitat conservation. The first nine tiger reserves were selected in 1973 to represent different habitat types, with all their species diversity. Thus, the dry deciduous dhauk (Anogeissus pendula) forests of Ranthambhore, the mangroves of the Sundarban, the large-leafed teak (Tectona grandis) forests of Melghat and the mixed deciduous and tropical semi-evergreen forests of Similipal seen here. Photo: Dr. Anish Andheria.
All this is doable. It is also financially viable. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that if for some reason tigers were to lose out to humans, the last tiger to walk in the wild will be in India. The trials, tribulations and success of Project Tiger exemplify the ability of humans to learn from their mistakes and overcome all possible hurdles to bring a large carnivore back from the brink, and that too in the 21st Century!
India still has within its cultures that magical spark of veneration of nature, which has vanished from most nations on the planet. We can reignite that magic for the rest of the world, but first we must work with nature to keep that spark alive in our own country, and also our own hearts.
The tiger can help make this magic happen.
Dr. Anish Andheria is a Carl Zeiss Conservation Awardee, a member of the National Tiger Conservation Authority and both Maharashtra and Jammu & Kashmir State Boards of Wildlife. He is a large carnivore biologist, and has co-authored two books on Indian wildlife. Anish is a member of the Maharashtra Coastal Zone Management Authority, and is on the Governing Council of the ‘Bombay Natural History Society’.
