BANGALORE: Vanishing tigers in Sariska and Ranthambore may have set the alarm bells ringing and finally led to the setting up of the Tiger Task Force by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last year. But the South, and happily, Karnataka, has much reason to celebrate: tiger reserves such as the Nagarahole have reported a healthy predator-prey ratio, indicating a healthy state of the forests.
The cause for worry though would be the rise in wildlife crimes and in poaching of tigers — the flagship species in the conservation chain — and other cats and elephants.
In fact, thanks to the work of Ullas Karanth, who heads the India programme of the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, in Nagarahole, Bhadra and Kudremukh, initiatives to relocate families living within these forests have been so successful that the Tiger Task Force has held up the Bhadra relocation case study, where Wildlife Conservation Society, and several wildlife non-government organisations worked with the Forest Department to get the forest dwellers to relocate voluntarily. It has been held as a successful model that can be replicated in all national parks where human incursions are adding to the man-animal conflict.
India would probably have been unable to recognise the warning signs and save these animals when they were hurtling towards extinction but for the work on tigers in the Kanha National Park by George Schaller in the 1960s, which defined the way India looks at wildlife and conservation. He put in place the first-ever scientific data collection and observation that continues to drive the country's conservation agenda. He has spent a lifetime studying mountain gorillas in Congo, tigers in India, lions on the Serengeti, snow leopards in Mongolia, and pandas in the mountains of western China.
In Bangalore over the weekend to present the Wildlife Conservation Society awards for outstanding conservation work, Dr. Schaller told students of wildlife biology and conservation at the National Centre for Biological Studies, "Don't turn your back on the forests and wildlife. They may be destroyed forever."
As for the state of the forests in the South, be it Nagarahole, Bandipur, or Mudumalai, Dr. Schaller commended the high level of involvement of local communities, students and researchers in the conservation efforts. In 1986, Dr. Karanth initiated the present Wildlife Conservation Society-India programme as a single tiger research project at Nagarahole.
The Wildlife Conservation Society awards are given to people who work with the local communities, and harness their passion for wildlife conservation innovatively and productively to create a new generation of wildlife soldiers.
"All we have is three per cent of the land for wildlife in protected forests: let us try to keep what is left," says Dr. Karanth.
