They say no one ever forgets the experience of seeing a tiger in the wild. Conservationists though now fear that this will soon become an experience that belongs only to history. Over the last five years, tiger numbers have been falling dramatically in India. From an official census of 4,300 tigers in 1989, it is said that India has only 1,411 tigers left.
The human-animal conflict due to deforestation and shrinking of the tiger's own habitat were also cited as reasons. The dwindling number of tigers over the last decade should, at the very least, has brought about renewed vigilance and tighter controls. Yet, the demand for tiger skins and body parts is increasing, particularly from China, where these are used extensively in medicines and as aphrodisiacs. In this Chinese Year of the Tiger, conservationists expect the big cat to be hunted down in larger numbers. The tiger trade is a lucrative business: killing a tiger can earn poachers Rs 4 lakh, a skin alone fetching Rs 2 lakh in the illegal market.
We decided to find out how the entire tiger racket works and who is involved. This is only the second time that we have put the tiger on our cover, even though we have been writing about the animal since 1976, first as man-eater and later as an endangered species. The first India Today cover on the tiger, in May 2005, analysed the true extent of India's conservation calamity.
This week's cover explains exactly how and why India's tigers are being exterminated with a somewhat unusual ground report. Principal Correspondent Mihir Srivastava travelled to Madhya Pradesh for the story, covering 3,000 km in 10 days. He was armed with a list of poachers from the Forest Department and the National Tiger Conservation Authority.
What is extraordinary is that the poachers are known to the government and yet they continue to roam free. Srivastava contacted the poachers in their settlements, posing as a surveyor sent by the Revenue Department. That helped him enter into conversations with the poachers, where two rival groups within the Pardhis-one of two major tribes of tiger-poachers in central India-spilt the beans on each other.
Srivastava spent time with the poachers, heard them negotiate with traders from Fatehpur and Delhi, and saw them make plans to travel to where tigers had been spotted. On the surface, the poachers appear to be poor but they use their basic living as a disguise to carry out their business which has given them bank balances, debit cards, motorcycles.
Along with the tiger they also hunt elephants for ivory, leopards and bears. Poaching is in fact their family profession and a handsome source of income. They have no remorse whatsoever of its impact on their ecology and its flagship tiger species. The vanishing of this majestic beast is not only a national shame but a reflection of our apathetic, corrupt administration which has known of the problem for the last two decades. This is an organised crime and it should be dealt with the same severity and determination. Let us not lose this great living heritage.