Hunting to saving, 50 years of Project Tiger
“Tyger tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
— William Blake
Wildlife science is conclusive that Panthera tigris tigris species had evolved some 2.4 million years ago in the forests of the Amur river watershed in far-eastern Russia and was commonly called the Siberian tiger. Much like all other creatures of the animal kingdom, after due consolidation as a life form, it gradually swept southwards, mainly along the eastern and southern seaboards of the Asian mainland. There was a limited spread in Central and Western Asia as well. This process concluded about 12,000 years ago when the tiger reached the southern arc from Kanyakumari in India to Bali in Indonesia. Due to certain geological evolutionary factors, the tiger remained exclusively an Asian mammal.
There never was a census of the tiger in India, or for that matter of wildlife per se. It was for the first time in 1963 that EP Gee, a tea-planter from Assam and an eminent naturalist, provided a guesstimate that in 1900 AD, there were perhaps 40,000 tigers in India. This figure has since been accepted as a reasonable working hypothesis. Unfortunately for the tiger, the year was also the high mark of the Raj in India when shooting a tiger became a status symbol, as much with the British as the Indian nobility.
But for the fateful intervention by the two World Wars, the tiger in India may well have been hunted to extinction in the first half of the 20th century. The stories of tiger-hunting excesses are simply unbelievable. For instance, a hunt organised over 10 days in 1903 in the Terai region claimed 32 tiger lives. Similarly, 39 tigers were shot by King George V on a state visit to Nepal in 1911. Between 1933 and 1940, guests of the Nepalese Prime Ministers dispatched another 433 tigers!
Little wonder then that by 1970, the number of tigers in India had plummeted to a guesstimated 1,800. At this stage, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands as chairman of WWF-International mounted a global initiative to save the tiger, and by 1972, created a corpus of $1 million for a start. Next, he arranged an urgent meeting between Guy Mountford, trustee of the WWF, and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to plead that as India was the last bastion of the surviving ‘viable tiger population’, it was best placed to prevent the looming extinction. On April 18, with her characteristic grace and steely determination, the Prime Minister accepted the challenge and also spontaneously pledged an equivalent of $1 million to the tiger corpus!
In Mountford’s words of that historic meeting, “Prime Minister Gandhi is a remarkable woman, with a genuine interest in both wildlife and conservation… her manner in discussion alternates between feminine charm and impressive masculine decisiveness. She was determined that everything possible should be done to save the tiger. She said she would form a special task force to report to her. To everyone’s astonishment, the task force was formed the next morning and it met the following day.”
She next chose her Cabinet colleague Dr Karan Singh to lead the task force, with the mandate to formulate a ‘mission blueprint’ and likely tiger reserves in three months. Dr Karan Singh chose his team of 10 prominent nature conservationists, whose blueprint won Indira Gandhi’s approval, including the proposals that (a) the task force be replaced by a ‘steering committee’ and (b) the declaration of tiger as the National Animal since it inhabited 27 states of India whereas the lion was from Gujarat alone. In a subsequent meeting, the Prime Minister assumed the role of chairperson with Dr Karan Singh as vice-chairman, and Kailash Sankhala of the Indian Forest Service as director. The committee was to report progress to her once every month. She chaired the meetings without a single postponement.
As to how deeply Indira Gandhi got committed to Project Tiger, she ventured to ask Sankhala, “What are your demands?” Now we find tiger’s destiny prompting Sankhala to say, “Give me 10 years without political and bureaucratic interference and God-willing, we shall save the tiger, Madam!” or words to that effect. And the rest is history. Over the next 15 years, and before her assassination in 1984, the tiger was considered well on the way to total recovery, with the official estimate of about 2,500 animals in the country’s first nine tiger reserves alone. In addition, there were some more tigers in India’s remaining wilderness.
As the Corbett National Park was India’s first ‘forest reserve’ created in 1936, it was in the fitness of things that the Prime Minister would officially launch Project Tiger from there on April 1, 1973.
