The Poor Get on Tigers’ Good Side

Crouching in a dry stream bed, the tracker traces the faint footprint of a tiger with his finger.

“This is from two nights ago. She came up from the water hole and went on that way,” Ramcharithar Uraon said, pointing into a dense forest of bamboo thickets and tapered sal trees in this park in eastern India.

The paw print, or pug mark, is the latest sign that park rangers have had of Rani, “the tigress of Betla,” named for the village in the Palamau reserve around which she ranges.

Trackers patrol 24 hours a day looking for signs of the big cats: a glimpse, tracks, droppings, remains of a kill. The clues are elusive -- not just because of the stealth with which tigers creep through the mottled forest, but because India’s tigers are vanishing.

As many as 100,000 tigers are thought to have roamed India 100 years ago. Based on a 2001 census, officials estimate there are 3,500 tigers left, but conservation activists believe there are far fewer.

The high-profile villains are gangs of poachers that kill cats for their pelts and bones, which are used mostly in traditional Chinese medicine. A single tiger carcass can fetch as much as $50,000.

The discovery last year that poachers had wiped out every tiger in Sariska, a premier tiger reserve in western India, caused an outcry and demands for beefed-up security in the parks.

But the threats to the tiger are as varied and complex as the lands they roam: disappearing natural habitats shared with millions of people; a tiger tourism industry that has alienated villagers; a communist rebellion in a core swath of tiger lands; and a conservation effort mired in bureaucracy.

“Sending in the commandos sounds very hip, but it isn’t the whole solution,” said Sunita Narain, an environmentalist who was asked to head the Tiger Task Force by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh after the revelations about what happened in Sariska, northeast of the city of Jaipur.

“We need a more nuanced and carefully devised strategy,” Narain said, noting that Sariska already had more armed guards per square mile than any other reserve in India. She said conservationists needed to take into account the realities of India, a largely impoverished country of more than 1 billion people -- about 800 million of whom live on less than $2 a day.

Southeast of Jaipur in the popular tiger reserve of Ranthambore, high-end hotels made $5 million last year, noted Narain. Almost none of that went to local people, she said, feeding animosity that has allowed poachers to operate freely and kill dozens of tigers there in recent years.

“We have to get away from tiger conservation for the rich, by the rich,” Narain said. “There has to be benefit sharing.”

Many tiger sanctuaries have people, often India’s poorest, living inside them.

Palamau, in the northern Indian state of Bihar, is a vivid illustration. It is home to nearly 200 villages inhabited by 100,000 Adivasis, indigenous tribesmen at the bottom of the complex Indian social ladder.

Although India’s cities are global technology hubs, these outlying communities bear only faint traces of modernity.

In the village of Betla, goats and donkeys wander in and out of low, windowless mud huts with drooping shingled roofs. The huts have no electricity or running water, and the only contact with the outside world comes from three public telephones in the dusty village center.

Residents of Betla and the other villages eke out an existence through subsistence farming, supplemented by what they gather from the forest.

About 30 tons of firewood and 60 tons of animal fodder are collected each day in the reserve, said P.K. Gupta, a senior forest officer at Palamau. Chunks of forest have been leveled for grazing, and mines encroach -- sometimes legally, sometimes not -- onto the sanctuary’s mineral-rich land, he said.

“The human pressure on the park is very high,” Gupta said.

Human conflict also has taken a toll. Decades of poverty have fueled resentment and made the area a hotbed for communist rebels whose insurgency has killed more than 7,000 people across India over more than two decades.

From 1990 to 2004, nine of Palamau’s park workers were killed by militants, who considered all government representatives targets. Others have been kidnapped or robbed, and their headquarters has been torched.

Many rangers fled, leaving the tigers with no guardians. The park’s tiger population decreased from an estimated 62 in 1984 to 35.

There have been no fatal attacks on wardens for two years. But half the park’s 130 ranger jobs remain unfilled, partly due to bureaucratic obstacles to hiring new people.

Yet in Palamau, there is a glimmer of hope. The decline in tigers halted and signs of five cubs were spotted the last two years, indicators that the animals have been experiencing less stress. Rangers estimate there are at least 38 tigers now.

The success has a lot to do with Narain’s theory that threats to tigers will be reduced if local people are shown they can benefit from conservation.

At Palamau, park workers began projects to improve conditions for villagers and reduce their dependence on the forest.

Solar-powered lamps and energy-efficient pressure cookers were handed out to reduce the need for firewood. Compensation for land, houses and livestock destroyed by wild animals was boosted to decrease the need to kill animals to protect private property.

A fund also was established to provide villagers with small loans to open shops or businesses. Workshops were set up to teach skills such as handicraft manufacturing, beekeeping and fish farming.

“We were cut off from the people. These projects brought us together,” said the park’s manager, A.N. Prasad.

After improving relations with the villagers, park officials were able to take a tougher stance with those who violate conservation rules. Since 2003, officials have imprisoned 37 people for felling trees, illicit grazing and poaching deer.

For Uraon, the Adivasi tracker, the program means a job in the forests where he was raised.

But others resent the forest officials. “They are forcing development on us,” said Shashibhusan Pathak, an Adivasi activist who argues that local people could be better conservationists without interference.

Despite evidence of more tigers in the remote park, the animals are elusive. The closest many visitors get to one is a stuffed head of a tiger killed 20 years ago by irate villagers and mounted on the wall of the information center.

But that will be gone soon, Gupta said. “It doesn’t give the right conservation message.”