Down To
Earth: New Delhi: Tuesday, December 25, 2018.
According
to the National Tiger Conservation Authority’s (NTCA) records till December 24,
2018, there were 96 cases of tiger deaths in the country. Of these, 41 were
have been reported outside tiger reserves. A recent Right To Information (RTI)
filed by Noida-based advocate, Ranjan Tomar yielded a response by the Wildlife
Crime Control Bureau which stated that a total of 384 tigers have been killed
between the period of 2008 to 2018. The RTI also asked about the count of
people arrested and prosecuted for killing tigers in the past 10 years.
Did
you know? By one estimate, between 1875 and 1925 alone, some 80,000 tigers were
killed in India.
Data
Source: Tiger Reserve Statistics, tigernet.nic.in, Last updated 24 December
2018
Of
the 96 deaths, 14 occurred in Maharashtra, which accounted for over 34 per cent
of all deaths outside tiger reserves in the country. A total of 19 tiger deaths
were recorded in Maharashtra in 2018, so deaths outside tiger reserves comprise
more than 70 per cent of all tiger deaths in the state. According to the last
tiger estimation exercise in the country in 2014, Maharashtra is home to 190
tigers, but more than a third of its tigers, or about 74 of them, live outside
tiger reserves in the state.
No
policy for protection of tigers outside reserves
Ninety-eight
tiger bodies were recovered in 2017 while 17 were presumed dead on the basis of
body parts seized. The highest number was reported from Madhya Pradesh (28),
followed by Maharashtra (21) and Assam (16), accounting for about 55 per cent
of the total number of deaths. The data also revealed that 54 tiger deaths, or
about 47 per cent of the total deaths, were recorded outside tiger reserves.
This is not surprising as about 40 per cent of India's tiger population is
believed to be living in forests outside tiger reserves. In 2016, the tiger
mortality figure was 122, which was over 50 per cent more than that in the
previous year when the total tiger deaths were 80.
Humanity’s
conflict with tigers has gradually increased since the 1970s, when India
launched a nation-wide tiger conservation project in 1973 that carved out
sanctuaries and national parks and made it a crime to kill a big cat. Though
methods for counting tigers have changed, census evidence suggests the number
of tigers has since gone up, from about 1,800 then to 2,226 in 2014. India now
has 50 tiger reserves that cover 2.12 per cent of the country's total
geographical area. According to the tiger census of 2014, India was home to
2,226 tigers, or about 60 per cent of the world's wild tiger population of about
3,890. Pressure on their habitat and poaching had seen their population decline
to a low of 1,411 in 2006.
.JPG)
.JPG)
