India to beef up tigers’ security

NEW DELHI — The Indian government wants to recruit retired soldiers to patrol tiger sanctuaries in an attempt to save the last of the cats after an official report confirmed a sharp drop in wild tiger numbers.

Conservationists praised the decision Friday, saying that though the plan has flaws, it was promising that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his government were taking the threat to the tiger seriously.

The plan was among a series of proposals presented Thursday by the government-run Wildlife Institute of India to the National Wildlife Board, which Singh chairs, as part of a two-year survey on India’s tigers.

The report confirms initial findings that there are no more than 1,500 tigers in India’s reserves and jungles, down from about 3,600 just five years ago and an estimated 100,000 a century ago.

It calls for appointing a senior police official to head the new Wildlife Crime Bureau, created to halt the killings and punish poachers. The report also recommended speeding up the relocation of villages from within reserves, filling park ranger posts and laying out “eco-tourism” guidelines to benefit local populations.

Belinda Wright, director of the Wildlife Protection Society of India, was skeptical of the plan to recruit retired soldiers to beef up forces that patrol sanctuaries. She said her group had found retired soldiers unwilling to join such a project. “They seem quite happy to enjoy their retirement and pension,” she said.

Conservationists said the major breakthrough was in Singh’s reaction to the report.

“The real progress is that the prime minister sat for two hours and listened to us and realized that this is a real problem,” Wright said.

Valmik Thapar, an independent filmmaker and tiger expert, said the measures could be the “beginning of a new era in wildlife conservation where the government, nongovernmental organizations and individual conservationists work together.”

These efforts could benefit tigers in sanctuaries, but the report says prospects are bleak for those roaming unprotected jungles and forests.

“One thing this report has found, very alarmingly, is that there are virtually no wild tiger populations outside the reserves,” Wright said.

Major factors in the decline of the tigers are poachers supplying body parts to the lucrative traditional Chinese medicine market and farmers and villagers competing with the wild animals for the same habitat.

On Friday, forest rangers were forced to hunt a tigress that apparently had strayed from the Tadoba-Andhari sanctuary in the western state of Maharashtra, killing three people and mauling two others.

“Both humans and tigers are fighting for space. It’s a difficult situation,” said B. Majumdar, a wildlife officer who was coordinating the hunt.

Angry villagers stoned the rangers’ vehicle, demanding that they kill the animal.

“You must get rid of it or we will kill it,” said Ganesh Deshmukh, a farmer. “We are scared to go to our fields and can’t send our children to school.”

Majumdar said rangers had had made several attempts to drive away the tiger and were now going to try to trap or tranquilize the beast. “Shooting is the last resort,” he said.