India to stop tiger tourism in attempt to prevent species extinction
For centuries, the prospect of spotting a Bengal tiger in the wild has been a highlight of visiting India. Now the Government is to end the spectacle amid fears that the species is being “loved to death” by visitors desperate for a glimpse of tigers in the wild.
Tourism is to be phased out in the core regions of the 37 tiger reserves, Rajesh Gopal, the head of India’s National Tiger Conservation Authority, told The Times. “We should not forget that tiger reserves are primarily for conserving the endangered tiger and tourism is just a secondary outcome,” he said. “Our reserves are small and prone to disturbance caused by tourism. They cannot compete with large African savanna parks, which can stand large number of tourists.”
The Environment Ministry has ordered India’s states to wind down tourism in such areas and to tightly regulate it in surrounding regions where the chance of seeing a tiger is far smaller, Dr Gopal said. People who live in core tiger habitats will be moved.
A count in February 2008 showed that India’s tiger population had plummeted to 1,411 animals, down from 3,642 in 2002. The latest figure is disputed, however. Some experts say that there may be only 800 wild tigers in India today and that the species could be rendered extinct in five years.
According to government officials, the species has already disappeared or is in danger of becoming extinct in 16 reserves. A century ago, when tiger hunting was a favourite pastime of Raj-era dignitaries, there were an estimated 40,000 in India.
The decline is largely due to poaching, but habitat damage caused by tourism has also reached critical levels, experts say. “Seeing a wild tiger has become a kind of status symbol,” M. K. Ranjitsinh, chairman of the Wildlife Trust of India, said. “People do not realise the harm to the broader ecosystem. They are loving the tiger to death.”
Tourists, whether in vehicles or on top of elephants, destroy the high grassland in which the big cats hunt, and drive away their prey, Mr Ranjitsinh said. In many parks, lodges have been built in core reserve areas while hotels block the corridors that tigers use to travel from one territory or reserve to another.
Some reserves have been criticised for using radio telemetry systems for tracking tigers for the benefit of tourists. Once found by a mahout — an elephant driver — brandishing an antenna, a single tiger can be hounded by dozens of tourist vehicles.
“The parks’ priorities have become warped,” Mr Ranjitsinh said. The bamboo forests and grassland in Kanha provided inspiration for Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book.
Experts agree that only radical action can bring back the tiger from the brink of extinction, but add that tourism is only one of several dangers. Poaching to feed Chinese demand for traditional tonics has taken a heavy toll. So too has competition for space between tigers and India’s booming human population.
Jairam Ramesh, the Environment Minister, said this month that unregulated tourism was as much a threat to tiger population as poaching. He said that he would clamp down on “mushrooming luxury resorts around tiger reserves”. He singled out Corbett National Park — named after the British hunter-turned-conservationist Jim Corbett and a favourite destination with Western tourists — as a habitat that had degenerated because of tourism. At least four tigers have died there in the past two months, according to reports.
Tiger facts
— 832 tigers known to have been killed in India from 1994 to 2007
— 1,411 India’s remaining wild tiger population in 2008
— 21 tiger deaths so far in 2010, 10 from natural causes, 11 from poaching
— $5,000 Price paid by traders to poachers for a complete dead tiger
— $50,000 Price paid for a complete tiger at market
— $35,000 Price paid for a tiger skin at market
Sources: WPSI, National Geographic, Business Week India
Article taken from http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle7109878.ece
Tiger tourism: the end is nigh
One more article on the issue
So India plans to severely limit "tiger tourism" – the economic highwire on which tiger survival and protection teetered for the last 30 years. Anyone who has seen the ugly charade of wild tigers being hemmed in by trained elephants only for hordes of tourists to shoot them with cameras ought to be pleased, shouldn't they?
Well, no, not exactly. The decision, unhappily, probably means that the tiger can now be exterminated in peace and quiet – directly by the poachers, and indirectly by the illegal loggers. Both of these destructive criminal groups are being ably defended and emboldened by elements in India's corrupt political classes, its feeble law enforcers and its porcine business community.
The tiger, as everyone knows, is in deep trouble. From an estimated 40,000 animals in India a century ago, the number is now down to around 1,400, according to the most recent national tiger census in 2008. Four sub-species are now extinct. In January 2005 the Sariska national park was forced to admit that all of its supposed 35 tigers had been killed after a group of students from the Wildlife Institute of India searched the park and couldn't find any, an exposé that also uncovered how park officials had been falsely exaggerating tiger numbers for years. Some experts argued that numbers might have fallen below the minimum for a viable population, something that would mean certain extinction in the wild.
It was never tourists that undermined the tiger protection campaign. When tigers disappeared from Panna and Sariska Parks, it was tourists and local nature-lovers who blew the whistle on park officials who had gerrymandered the tiger statistics, hiding losses to poachers. There is further evidence from eminent tiger scientist and whistleblower, Dr Raghu Chundawat, that increasing tourist numbers have actually helped tiger preservation in Madhya Pradesh, the so-called tiger state, probably by making poaching more difficult.
No doubt there is a problem with tourism and tigers right now in India. Rising visitor numbers has led to a rapid growth in wildlife lodges and resorts – development that has come, reputedly, with some nice kickbacks for officials. Most of these new sightseers are solely concerned with tigers, an obsession that has helped distract from the fact that India's wonderful forests are being damaged and many of its 500 species of animal and 1,200 birds are heading, remorselessly, for extinction. On one trip in 2009, I repeatedly ran into a jeep of tourists speeding around desperately looking for a tiger. They had driven straight past a pack of dhole, the Indian wild dog, ironically a species rarer than the tiger.
How to avoid the dreadful probability of tiger extinction? One gleam of hope is that some experts, including Julian Matthews of the charity, Tour Operators for Tigers, feel that the way forward is with eco-tourism in well-managed parks - something along the lines already tried in Africa. If handled correctly, increased visitor numbers, the logic goes, could encourage good practice and ward off poachers.
So change tourism, but not do away with it. Take away the elephant drives and the endless traffic jams of jeeps filled with chattering city-educated guides who often know less than the average visitor. Start some real tourism: walking and trekking in jungle areas using local guides who can point out the myriad of wonderful plants and animals. Forsyth Lodge at Satpura has made a commendable start on this, but many tour operators are not even aware that such trips are permissible. When I was in Madhya Pradesh in 2009, the then chief wildlife officer, Dr H S Pabla explicitly stated that hiking in India's parks was now legal.
The ordinary park workers have a wealth of knowledge about wildlife that is routinely ignored, or simply hidden behind language barriers. Snobbery and arrogance about such communities, many of them tribal, is rampant in India, but the parks have a wealth of talent and right-minded individuals. I've been on safaris where the driver, silent because of low caste, knew a million times more than the "expert" guide, a Mumbai whizz-kid with a degree.
That is not to suggest that real expertise and genuine enthusiasm do not appear at all levels of the heirarchy and it is these people, whatever their caste, tribe, or education, who are needed to lead the way out of the mess. Sensitively-managed tourism needs to be encouraged, as do the many young Indian visitors who are now in the vanguard of changing attitudes towards the environment in the country. Cutting them off from any prospect of seeing a tiger will only harm the cause.
The article can be found at http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/blo...-tiger-tourism
No plan to stop tiger tourism says India
NEW DELHI // India’s environment minister yesterday denied reports that the government was planning to phase out tourism in the country’s world famous tiger reserves.
Hundreds of thousands of visitors from all over the world travel to India every year to catch a glimpse of a Bengal tiger, one of the world’s most endangered species, and a ban would have dealt a heavy blow to the country’s tourism industry.
Jairam Ramesh, India’s minister for the environment and forests, said: “Our policy is to develop a set of guidelines for eco-tourism where tourism takes place in a sustainable way, linked to the carrying capacity of the reserves. We are not at all interested in stopping tiger tourism.”
Last week, the Times of London reported that the National Tiger Conservation Authority was planning to phase out tourism in the core area of India’s tiger reserves because large numbers of visitors were destroying the cat’s habitat and driving away prey.
Six of India’s 37 tiger reserves are open to tourists and the core areas offer the best chance of sighting one of these elusive animals.
The report sent shockwaves though India’s high-end tourism industry and many experts spoke out against such a ban, saying that well-managed tourism is one of the best ways to ensure the big cat’s survival.
India’s tiger population has plummeted in recent years as a result of poaching and loss of habitat.
A census in February 2008 showed India’s tiger population had dropped to 1,411 from 3,642 in 2002. Some experts say there may be as few as 800 wild tigers left in India and that the species could be extinct in five years.
Mr Ramesh said that tourism at some reserves needed to be better regulated but that revenues generated from visitors meant that the local communities were invested in the animal’s long term survival.
“Tourism is the only way to generate revenue for the local community,” Mr Ramesh said. “We have no intention of stopping tourism.”
Link - http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs....705039846/1002
