Trouble in Tigerland: Why conservation efforts continue to fail

The myth of the Protected Area

The trend: The last three decades have seen a surge in protected areas, both globally and nationally. In 2009, there were approximately 70,000 protected areas covering a total of 18 million square kilometres in the world. In India, this surge is linked with the Wild Life Protection Act of 1972. At the turn of the century, there were 623 protected areas in the country covering approximately 4% of the land area.

The results:

However, has this had the expected results? Studies indicate otherwise suggesting that global biodiversity trend is inversely proportional to the areas protected*. In India, after the initiation of Project Tiger- an exercise involving the deployment of many jeeps and guns and much displacement- the number of tigers increased steadily till 1989. Studies have shown that the increase might be attributed to the over –zealousness of the forest administration in inflating tiger numbers to please political powers. With the decrease in direct political interest in tiger conservation, and through the repeated exposure of attempts at falsication, it was clear that tiger numbers had only marginally increased over the last foru decades of project tiger. This illustrates the inadequacy of Project Tiger. 

The reasons:

Despite these figures, the continuing trend of declaring protected areas indicates that species conservation is only one of the motivating factors. Certainly, revenue generation is one important motivator. Wildlife tourism is an important source of income both for the State and for private operators. In India, it is also relatively easy to declare an area as ‘protected’. With the exception of the North-East, most forests in India are state-owned, which eases the way for notification of protected areas.

The origins:

Part of our fascination with the notion of ‘protected areas’ stems from our inherited environmental history. Earlier colonial management- preoccupied with the harvesting of timber- identified traditional management practices such as controlled fires as ‘the chief, almost the only enemy’ (Pyne, 1994). This does not take into account the fact that most forests have evolved with fire. Fire is a problem for timber, since the wood is damaged by the flames. However it is crucial for non-timber forest products such as tubers and grasses, which forest-dwellers are dependent on. 

The effect:

Since Independence, protected areas have physically displaced 0.6 million people. Forest dwellers were forced out of the mainstream economy in colonial times by being refused rights to land. Thus they were ‘arborealised’ or made dependent on things with little or no market value.