Indian tiger park 'has no tigers'

One of India's main tiger parks - Panna National Park - has admitted it no longer has any tigers.

The park, in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, was part of the country's efforts to save the famous Royal Bengal Tiger from extinction.

State Minister of Forests Rajendra Shukla said that the reserve, which three years ago had 24 tigers, no longer had any.

A special census was conducted in the park by a premier wildlife institute, after the forest authorities reported no sightings of the animals for a long time.

This is the second tiger reserve in India, after Sariska in Rajasthan, where numbers have dwindled to zero.

Most of the tigers at Panna National Park were killed by poachers

Warning bells

Officials from the wildlife department say there is no "explicable" reason for the falling number of tigers.

But a report prepared by the central forest ministry says Panna cannot be compared with Sariska because "warning bells were sounded regularly for the last eight years".

The report says wildlife authorities failed to see the impending disaster despite repeated warnings, and lost most of Panna's big cats to poaching.

While this controversy rages, there have been reports that another national park in Madhya Pradesh, Sanjay National Park, which was included in the tiger project three years ago, also has no tigers left.

The park had a population of 15 tigers until the late 1990s.

Of the more than 1,400 tigers in the country, 300 dwell in the state of Madhya Pradesh, which is also called the "tiger state of India".

Best managed

But Madhya Pradesh's forest minister Rajendra Shukla says all the news is not bleak.

"Panna is our only park which has lost on this count," he says. "Three of state's reserve forests - Kanha, Bandhavgarh and Pench - have been adjudged among the best managed tiger reserves in the country."

Mr Shukla has drawn up a seven-member committee comprising the state's chief conservator of forests and experts, to ascertain why the tigers have disappeared.

Indian officials regularly carry out tiger censuses in the national parks

The chief conservator, HS Pabla, told the BBC that the report would be submitted some time in August.

He said that tigers from Sanjay National Park "could have strayed to the adjoining area, which is now part of the state of Chattisgarh, created some years ago."

The authorities have recently transported two female tigers to Panna from another nearby tiger park, and sought permission from the central administration to bring in four more, two of them males.

Project tiger

India had 40,000 tigers a century ago, but the numbers dwindled fast because of hunting and poaching.

The country banned tiger hunting and launched an ambitious conservation effort named Project Tiger to increase the population of the endangered species.

A number of forest areas were declared national parks and funds allotted for protecting the tigers.

Though the programme bore fruit initially, with the decline in numbers checked because of a hunting ban, recent years have seen a phenomenal rise in poaching, which is now organised almost along the lines of drug-smuggling.

The authorities have not been able to put a stop to it, owing to the ever-changing techniques used by the cartels, and corruption within.

MK Ranjitsingh, a member of National Wildlife Advisory Board, says the authorities must crack down on the poachers by preventing their activities in the parks, and stopping the export of tiger products.

And they must, he adds, lobby for international pressure on the nations of the Far East, which are the main buyers of such goods.

There have been reports that there is a huge demand for tiger bones, claws and skin in countries like China, Taiwan and Korea.

News Report: BBC News South Asia.

Steps sought to prevent animals from being hit

A tiger narrowly escapes from being run over by a vehicle on the Mudumalai-Bandipur road

Even as the Mudumalai-Bandipur road across the Nilgiris-Karnataka border continues to be in the news on account of the ban imposed recently on vehicular movement during night to protect wild animals, an incident on Monday has brought into sharp focus the threat posed by speeding vehicles to wildlife.

NARROW ESCAPE

A motorist, G. M. Bhoja Raju, who was proceeding towards Mysore, captured through the camera of his cell phone a tiger narrowly escaping from being hit by a speeding vehicle.

Sharing the picture with some wildlife enthusiasts, he wondered why people drove fast within wildlife habitats.

Speaking to The Hindu here on Tuesday, some wildlife enthusiasts pointed out that since there were no speed-breakers on the stretch, most motorists drove fast. Pointing out that there were speed-breakers within the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve, they felt that similar speed control measures should be implemented between Mudumalai and Bandipur also.

The number of tigers in the Nilgiris, Karnataka and Kerala had gone up to about 260, they said.

“CARE FOR WILDLIFE”

Motorists should be sensitive to the needs of the wild animals in general and particularly to those of the tiger, they added.

"Protecting tigers is a tough job. We have to keep at it"

Minister of Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh spoke with Mihir Srivastava about the precarious situation of the tiger reserves, dwindling tiger population and ongoing efforts to save them. Excerpts from the interview:

Jairam Ramesh

Q. How do you plan to save the tiger in India?

A. It is a long-drawn process with no overnight solutions. It would need a lot of efforts to reverse the trends. We would have to deal with the real estate mafia, mining mafia and criminal mafia linked to the international smuggling of tiger parts. These issues need to be recognised and addressed.

Q. Is the Government still to recognise these issues?

A. We have recognised these issues. We have entered into a tripartite agreement with the state governments and the park managements in all the 39 tiger reserves to help define roles and responsibilities.

Q. How are the 39 tiger reserves doing?

A. Nine of them are in good condition, 14 are satisfactory and 16 in poor state.

Q. How do you plan to deal with it?

A. We need to give local communities a stake in the protection of forests. I have suggested that the state governments create a social protection force with people drawn from the local community. Also, we have, after 18 years, asked the states to recruit lower-level staff like forest guards and foresters.

Q. But tigers and people cannot live together. People know killing a tiger means big money.

A. The core areas are inviolate and exclusive for tigers; buffer zone is an inclusive zone. Relocation of some 80,000 families out of forests, both in the core and buffer zones, are being given importance. Each family is being paid Rs 10 lakh. We have so far moved 3,000 families out of the forests but the process needs to be expedited.

Q. Are you also open to private participation in the conservation of forests?

A. No. We have created a Tiger Conservation Foundation for every tiger reserve. They can contribute money to help the cause.

Q. There is no accountability mechanism in place. How do you plan to deal with it?

A. The tripartite agreement will help in better information exchange and coordination. Protecting tigers is a tough job. We have to keep at it.

News report:India Today

Market for tiger parts:

Skin ($20,000-25,000)
Used for display and to treat mental illness.

Brain ($2,000)
Used to treat laziness and pimples.

Nose leather ($500)
Used to treat superficial wounds and minor bites.

Bones ($500/kg)
Treats rheumatism, arthritis, general weakness, headaches, stiffness or paralysis in lower back and legs and dysentery.

Whiskers, ($100)
Used to treat toothache.

Eyeballs, ($250-300 per pair)
Used to treat epilepsy and malaria.

Gall Bladder($400)
The bile is used to treat convulsions and meningitis in children.

Teeth ($10/tooth)
Used to treat fever, rabies and asthma.

Fat($400/kg)
Used as a cure for vomiting, dog bites, bleeding, and haemorrhoids.

Claws ($480)
Used as a sedative for insomnia.

Penis ($200-500)
Used in love potions and as an aphrodisiac.

Tail ($600)
In powdered form, said to treat skin diseases.

Tracking the tiger killers

They are the people responsible for India's iconic animal being threatened with extinction, a tragedy of unimaginable proportions. Two nomadic hunting tribes, along with corrupt or incompetent forest officials, continue to hunt the tiger in its natural habitat using primitive traps. The result is that tiger population figures have registered an all-time low.


India has lost two-thirds of its tigers in the last eight years. Driven by greed and the money, they can earn by selling tiger skin and parts to the Chinese market, India's most notorious poachers are decimating tiger populations virtually unchecked. Sariska and Panna have lost all their tigers to poaching even as forest officials feign ignorance. Principal Correspondent Mihir Srivastava has been on the trail of the poachers to identify the main culprits, their modus operandi, their buyers and the havoc they have already caused among India's tiger population. His report:
The Pardhis and Bawariyas are nomadic hunting tribes who travel across the country to poach tigers to supply them to organised smugglers in tiger parts who feed the market in China. They commit crimes as a family vocation, are cunning, constantly on the move, and kill tigers with religious fervour.

2,200 tigers were killed in the last decade. Their current population is one-third of what it was in 2000.

80 sites where wild tigers exist in India. Only 39 are tiger reserves.

16 tiger reserves are critical, heading the way of Sariska and Panna which lost all their tigers to poachers.

60 tigers a year is the demand from the Chinese market from two poaching gangs alone.

Killing a tiger means big money, Rs 2 lakh for a tiger skin, and being adept hunters, it also means easy money, tiger parts and organs fetch another Rs 2 lakh. What is less known about these tribes is that they indulge in other criminal activities. They also kill leopards, bears and elephants for ivory, indulge in organised theft of railways and telecom properties, are into sandalwood smuggling while some do contractual murders. Being nomadic, they cannot be traced for their crimes. Their latest racket is land scams, and Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi would be shocked to know that the men and women who are killing tigers in the state's reserves are also part of a gigantic compensation scam for the Narmada Valley Project.
Pardhis have migrated en-mass from various villages in Katni district of Madhya Pradesh, a Mecca for poachers, down to Khandwa and Harda districts along the Maharashtra border to seek compensation as displaced families from the Narmada Valley Project. Some of them have actually got lakhs of rupees as compensation along with land, while others are camping there for their share of the booty. Locals know about it but are too scared to talk.


Pardhis with the tiger parts seized in Allahabad in 2007
Local officials do nothing presumably because they are getting a cut. If tigers are to be saved in the forests of India, this vicious network and nexus of tribals and traders will have to be broken. It is now clear that tigers and tribals cannot live together in a forest, as was the case traditionally, for the lure of big money is impossible to resist.
The poachers are hired and sent into the forests by notorious traders like Sansar Chand and Shabeer Hassan Qureshi. Both are currently in jail and together would be responsible for 1,000 tiger deaths in the last decade but now their extended families are carrying on with tiger killings. It's a tightly knit nexus: traditional hunting families supply tiger parts to traditional families trading in wild animals. Poachers-turned-informers and some Pardhis themselves revealed the modus operandi and rewards.

Shabeer Hassan Qureshi

Sansar Chand

Sansar Chand and Hassan Qureshi are together responsible for the estimated killing of 1,000 tigers.

Here's how the unholy nexus works-and spells doom for the tiger. The tribal hunters receive orders, estimated to be for 60 tigers a year, to be skinned and body parts collected and preserved. The hunting party, including women and children, sets off by train to the target zone. Reaching the targeted forest, they camp in the vicinity, setting up temporary shops selling cheap jewellery as a cover. It takes them just a few days to learn about tiger movements in the area.
They lay out the bait-wild animal meat-to attract tigers and conceal iron traps along the path the tiger will take to the bait. It needs a dozen-men team to monitor the movement of the tigers and the patrolling routine of forest guards. Usually, the last patrol is around midnight and they are free to stalk the tiger undisturbed till late next morning. The success rate of tribal poachers is very high but the consequences for India's national animal are tragic and inhuman.

The jaws of the iron trap close with a great force; cracking the powerful leg of the tiger in two and holding it like a vice. The hunters arrive on the scene from their hiding place and thrust a thick bamboo pole with a pointed spear into the tiger's mouth and stuff some earth into it to make sure death is quick and quiet. It takes half a dozen men to release a dead tiger from the trap. Male tigers can weigh up to 225 kg, a tigress up to 136 kg. Then, using a razor-sharp knife, they skin the tiger on the spot. Then they slice it open and remove organs, including the penis which fetch high prices in China.
Pardhis do the primary tanning of the skin at the site by stretch-drying the skin after applying turmeric and salt. They bury the carcass nearby, and come a week later to retrieve the bones when the rotten flesh has fallen away. The hunters can kill five tigers in one trip in the same forest. They will camp for a couple of months, eat deer and wild boar, and in the process kill not just tigers, but leopards as well.

To meet one such group of the Pardhis, we went to Bediya village in Khandwa district where they have shifted base from their hideouts in Katni to claim false compensation. Bediya has neatly built houses. A short distance away is where the Pardhis live in shanties that look as if recently built. They mob the car and enquire: if you are from the revenue department with compensation documents. The only sign of well-being are motorcycles, some without registration numbers.
The motorcycles are used for meetings between trader and the hunters to get contracts to kill tigers for the international market for animal parts, a market next only to the illicit trade in drugs in magnitude. The wholesalers and traders of tiger's parts come on motorbikes to place orders, oversee the progress and arrange for delivery to Fatehpur, Kanpur, Ghaziabad and Delhi. While one half of the Pardhi population is involved in an audacious land scam, the other half is combing the jungles of Karnataka to get some "chaddars" (tiger skins) to meet current orders. Maur Lal, a Pardhi, agrees to take us to another village, Kuksi, in Harda district. The menfolk, we are told, should be out hunting but they come back to share the booty, connect with their family and procure more orders.

Tribal hunters receive orders, estimated to be for 60 tigers a year, to be skinned and body parts collected and preserved

Their official source of income is selling rudraksh procured from Nepal. Maur Lal explains: "We get it from Nepal, via Katni, Kanpur, Lucknow, Gorakhpur." That also happens to be the route to smuggle out tiger parts into Nepal on its way to China.
We meet 'English', the dreaded poacher on the run. English finds mention as one of the poachers responsible for hunting tigers in the Special Investigation Team report by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) on Panna along with others. His extended family includes the likes of Mintar Singh, who was arrested two years ago with 36 accomplices for poaching eight lions in Gir. Others like Daryawani and Lalarsi are still at large, operating with impunity, taking calls on their mobiles, discussing prices for tiger skins and parts, but only if you say you are from Fatehpur, where most of the orders to this group are sourced from.

Dabuliya Bai, head of Pardhi clan, is believed to have delivered some 35 tiger skins to Sansar Chand

While we were talking, a fat lady comes charging towards us, yelling: "I will tell you their real story. None of them belong here, they are from Katni, they are all criminals, they have killed my daughter, they kill wild animals too. I cannot let them fool the Government." She is Dabuliya Bai, head of a clan of the Pardhis.
No one dares to stop her while she spews venom at the rival gang run by Kanthi Lal. Her own family record in killing tigers is unmatched. Her husband Raj Mahal with his gang is believed to have killed 35-40 tigers in Maharashtra and Karnataka. Her brother, Siddhe Singh, died in jail serving a sentence for tiger poaching. Daru, who operated in Gujarat and Karnataka and is under arrest for poaching, is a relative. She is believed to have delivered some 35 tiger skins to Sansar Chand, the most notorious trader of tiger skins. Her nephew, Ajit Pardhi, has made a fortune killing tigers and pays more than a lakh of premium on insurance policies in his, his wife and his brother-in-law's name.
To find out why she is camping in Kuksi, we travel to Katni where we meet octogenarian Baburu Pardhi, a legendary figure in the community who has poached many tigers and leopards, but has never been arrested. Baburu has passed the baton to his five sons believed to be involved in most of the tiger killings in Panna and Rajasthan.

Dauwa with his family, all of whom are into poaching business

Tracing the poachers, we visit Khiraini on the road that leads to the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve. We meet Dauwa who spills the beans. Dabuliya's outburst is part of a turf war between poachers on who will get access to prime hunting grounds in Karnataka and Maharashtra.

The stakes are high enough: 30 tiger skins for each gang, each year, which means 30 tigers dead and crores earned. That makes them extremely competitive. "Till about two years ago, the two gangs would agree to travel to different locations to poach, but now they all want to go to Karnataka and Maharashtra where there is a healthy tiger population," says Nitin Desai, WPSI's director in central India, who has been instrumental in the successful investigation of poaching cases in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.

"There is also a rift in revenue sharing as they are fighting for a larger share of the booty," explains Manjula Shrivastava, an anti-poaching lawyer in Katni with a record of 98 per cent conviction in poaching cases. Dauwa claims that he has nothing to do with poaching but he fails to mention that his wife, Sukh Chiana, was arrested with Qureshi in 2007.

Three hours away is Panna National Park which lost all its tigers, 35 in just five years, to poaching while the Forest Department blatantly lied that all was well (see box). Now they have started a novel initiative to provide the Pardhis with alternative means of livelihood, other than hunting. In 2007, with the help of World Wide Fund for Nature-India, the forest department opened residential schools for the children of the Pardhis. "It was very difficult to convince Pardhis to send their children to school.

They thought it was another ploy to arrest them by the Forest Department," says Indrabhan Singh Bundela, field officer for the Pardhi project here. The children, in all about 200, some of them sons and daughters of the most notorious poachers, talk freely about how their parents used to kill tigers and bring trophies home. Some Pardhi families, all of whom were poachers earlier, have been hired as local guardians by the school.

One of them is Daheli Pardhi, who says that he was involved in tiger and leopard poaching in the past as there was no other source of livelihood. "Now my people do not trust me. They think I have changed loyalties," he says. That is why he does not get to know where his peers are travelling and on what mission. He explains the economics of poaching. The Rs 2 lakh for each tiger killed is shared between the team members, but according to the size of their families. The sharing of booty leads to conflicts too, as the spat between the Dabuliya Bai and the Kanthi Lal gangs reveal.

Critics of the scheme abound, and claim that the scheme merely allows poachers to go hunting more freely, unencumbered by children. However, Pramod Shukla, a forest guard involved in this project, insists that there are advantages. "Thanks to this project, we now have access to the Pardhis. They have opened up before us. We understand them better and we have been able to breach their earlier impregnable fortress and this can be used for counter-poaching operations as well as to reform them."

But reforming the Pardhis seems to be a far cry given the scenario seen by India today. For forest officials, the emphasis is on protection of tigers within protected areas. But when the big cats move out to territorial forests, they are easy prey for the poachers and their steel traps.

Acknowledges Sanjoy Majumdar, conservator of forests in Katni: "A forest guard with 10 sq km to cover on foot can do little against poaching." He points to many cases where it is difficult to save a forest guard if he happens to kill a poacher in the forest, as the guard will then be tried for the murder. Invariably, the forest guard in such cases has had to be suspended pending the inquiry.

The Pardhis travel to far-flung places to hunt. They travel by train and even ticket collectors are too scared to confront them for travelling for free. They are always successful in the hunt and poorly equipped and poorly trained forest officials and guards seem powerless to stop them. Last year, 43 people were sentenced in the Katni forest division for poaching and supplying animal parts to international poachers Qureshi and Darya Singh. Property worth Rs 2crore was seized from Qureshi. Last month, the gravity of the problem was highlighted by no less than the prime minister himself, who wrote a personal letter to the chief ministers of five states urging them to act more forcefully in saving the tiger from poachers.

His concern is timely. In 1989, in the wake of Project Tiger, India's tiger population was 4,334. By 2001-02, it had dropped to 3,642. Today, it is down to a shocking 1,411 tigers spread across all of India, the lowest since the Independence. The india today investigation shows that the impunity with which the Pardhis operate is scandalous and an eye-opener.

The obvious answer is not in India's hands, namely to crack down on the insatiable market for tiger parts and skins in China, where it is used in traditional medicine or as an aphrodisiac.

The Chinese, however, can only be pressured by international organisations dealing with wildlife protection. The Pardhis, as our interaction revealed, are hardcore criminals who also happen to be skilled trackers and hunters, a deadly combination. The alarm bells have been ringing long enough. If the concerned chief ministers and forest officials fail to act, our children may never get to see one of the world's most magnificent animals and our national symbol, in its natural habitat.
NEWS Reported:May,2010,India Today

SAVE OUR TIGERS

SAVE OUR TIGERS

Forest mismanagement

Tigers are the most researched animal in India, if not the world, and that should help the cause of its conservation. But in India, the issue is politicised. Tiger conservation is now looked as denying tribals the right to live.


Tiger bones and skin seized from Corbett National Park in 2009
While it is easy to blame hunting tribes for the dwindling tiger population, the forest management is also responsible. In Panna, 30 tigers were lost in three years despite written warnings and campaigns by NGOs, wildlife experts and the Central Empowered Committee (CEC) constituted by the Supreme Court.
The state Forest Department was instead busy covering up its inaction. The then principal secretary, forests, Avani Vaish, in his letter to the CEC dated April 5, 2005, said, "The sentiments (Panna tigers are threatened) is, unfortunately, almost directly quoted from the report of a disgruntled researcher who bears a personal grudge against the park management." In five years, Panna lost all its tigers.

Shockingly, the officers in Panna's Forest Department were later promoted. Vaish is now the chief secretary of Madhya Pradesh, a state with the highest tiger population in the country. Sadly, official apathy is rampant and unchecked.

Rajesh Gopal, member-secretary of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), says, "We have to work through the system. We cannot antagonise the state governments. We in Delhi and Bhopal cannot be expected to know what is happening locally." In other words, passing the buck. The Special Investigation Team (SIT) report by NTCA is now gathering dust for a year. The SIT report has the details of poachers and their whereabouts. If only the Government had acted promptly, at least a dozen tigers could have been saved. Says Belinda Wright, executive director of Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI): "We need to examine when negligence becomes connivance."

The message is clear: Tiger is dispensable. Habitat destruction is as big a problem as poaching is. Says renowned tiger expert Bittu Sahgal: "The trouble is that politicians want tigers to live in habitated areas." Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment suggests a greater role and share for the locals in the management and benefits coming out of forests and tourism, ignoring the fact that there are economic incentives to kill tigers over the preservation of forests.

Only intelligence-driven enforcement can break the poacher-trader nexus, believes Raghunandan Singh Chundavat, a tiger expert whom Vaish had referred to as disgruntled researcher. He calls for greater transparency and accountability in the way forests are managed and advocates protecting tiger habitat and main prey bases.

The other problem is the biggest market for tiger parts is China. It has tiger farms to breed the big cat and is a signatory to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) agreement, which says that "tigers should not be bred for trade in their parts and derivatives."

The way out, as the International Tiger Coalition demands, is to phase out tiger farms and destroy stockpiles of tiger parts and derivatives. "This will send a clear message to consumers, enforcers and business that the use of the endangered Asian big cat skins and bones is over," stresses Debbie Banks, lead campaigner for the London-based Environmental Investigative Agency (EIA). But as of now, the poachers are getting a different message from China: go and hunt tigers.

THE STORY OF TIGER'S AND THEIR STRUGGLES

Tigers (Panthera tigris) are the largest and the heaviest of the big cat family. The name ‘Tiger’ is derived from the Greek word ‘Tigris’, meaning ‘arrow’, which itself may have been originated from Persian, symbolizing the animal’s speed. They are mainly found in South and East Asia, and a sub-species called theSiberian Tigers in Eastern Siberia. The fact that they are solitary animals needing vast landscapes to prey and that they are found in some of the most populous countries have led to their decreasing count.

A group of tigers is a rare sight, as they are solitary animals, but when seen is called an ‘ambush’. Their strength, stripes and speed has charmed men from time immemorial and has been included in our ancient mythologies. Their stripes are unique to them; the pattern and density of the stripes differs from tiger to tiger; the colour of the stripes too varies from brown to pure black. These mainly serve as camouflages; helping them to hide, blend with the surrounding landscape and hunt down their preys. This sort of hunting is called ambushing the prey.

India is known as the ‘land of Tigers’. One of the eight sub-species, the Bengal Tiger/ Royal Bengal Tiger (Panthera tigris tigris) is found in the parts of India, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Burma.