Number of Tigers increased in India

NEW DELHI: Good news for nature lovers and tiger conservationists as there is a 12% increase in the estimated tiger population in recent census.

The government said on Monday, the estimated number of tigers in the country rose to 1,636 in 2010 from 1,411 in 2006.

Including the newly surveyed Sundarban area in the Ganga-Brahmaputra delta, India now has a total of 1,706 tigers. The 2006 number did not include the Sundarban tigers as they were not surveyed due to accessibility problems.

Jairam Ramesh, India’s environment minister who has recently taken several steps to reduce encroachment of wildlife reserves said on Monday, “We no longer have to hang our head in shame over the 1,411 figure.”

But Ramesh raised a read flag over another crucial finding of the survey — that the area inhabited by the tigers shrunk by a whopping 22%. From 9.4 million hectares, the home of India’s tiger fell to 7.3 million hectares, primarily due to pressure from increasing population and development.

“The tiger is no longer spotted in many of the peripheral areas it was, in 2006,” explained Qamar Qureshi, scientist at the Wildlife Institute of India, the government organisation that conducted most of the survey. The tigers, he pointed out, are being hemmed in from all sides into their core habitats, primarily in jungles and wildlife reserves.

He said, such a drastic shrinkage is leading to isolation of tiger population and while it won’t impact thier numbers in the short term, it will definitely have a huge negative impact on them in the coming decades.

“When an isolated population has less than 20 breeding tigresses, in-breeding sets in and they can become extinct soon after,” he said, adding that only 5 reserves in India have more than this number of female tigers.

Jairam Ramesh, however, said he saw no easy solution to the problem. “One of the biggest reasons for the fragmentation of tiger habitats is roads. We have blocked many projects because they would cut off tiger populations from each other, but I cannot hold them back for much longer,” he said.

“What we found was that the connecting patches between different tiger habitations are being destroyed by structures like roads, destruction of forests, expansion of human habitation etc,” he added.