Indian wildlife sanctuary, information data and its condition

[Shardul]

@Pckts

Let us agree to disagree with respect to poaching vis a vis deforestation. Also, my opinion is only about India, not the rest of the world.

Regarding revenue, It doesn't matter if I say forest department or Indian govt, since the forest dept is an arm of the Indian govt. I am not going to read those links. Like I said previously, only way I will change my opinion is if someone provides me with a link to the government revenue figures from tiger reserves and its expenditure on tiger conservation. I'll treat the rest as bogus.

"Kaziranga is a protected park inside of Assam, Im not sure how many tigers Manas has, but protected areas are obviously going to hold better numbers than others. Corbett is a protected area and has the highest tiger population in the world I believe, not sure about their elephant population, but Im sure its more as well, they don't come close to the number of tigers per sq. mile that Kazi has though."

Ok, now I need to explain you how protected areas are defined in India.

1) Tiger Reserves - Highest protection and maximum funding. They are the only areas to have the concept of core and buffer zones. No human activity in core, some activity allowed in buffer.
2) National parks - Intermediate protection- No human activity allowed
3) Wildlife Sanctuaries- Intermediate protection - some human activity allowed
4) Reserved Forest - low protection - some human activity may be allowed
5) Revenue forest- no protection - maybe used for timber felling

Then you have elephant reserves, biosphere reserves which are somewhat similar to sanctuaries but I am not going to discuss them. I will focus on tiger reserves.

Under the Project Tiger, several key areas were identified for long term protection. They were called tiger reserves. These were formerly national park and wildlife sanctuaries which held promise as far as tiger survival was concerned. They were combined with surrounding reserve forests to form tiger reserves.

For eg, Kanha Tiger reserve = Kanha National Park + Resrved forests + Phen sanctuary
Corbett Tiger reserve = Corbett National Park + Sonanadi Wildlife sanctuary + reserve forests

There are now 48 tiger reserves in India, starting from an inital 9 in 1972.

Kanha, Corbett, Kaziranga, Manas, Ranthambhore, Bandhavgarh, Kabini, Bandipur, Sariska, Panna, Satpura, Tadoba, Pench, Periyar and plenty of others.

They are all tiger reserves and have the same level of protection on paper. But the difference is in the way these areas are managed. Each tiger reserve comes under  a park management team headed by a Field Director. And its often the performance of the park authorities and a combination of other factors that decide how that particular tiger reserve performs.

Manas and Kaziranga, both are tiger reserves (Kazi got it pretty recently actually) in Assam, but Kaziranga management has done an amazing job by their strict dealing with poachers. Manas on the other hand, has not fared well due to militants occupying it through the 2000s. Consequently, it lost all its rhinos and most of its tigers along with its world heritage status. It is now slowly recuperating.

Manas is perhaps the most beautiful park in all of India, and has a tremendous potential for long term tiger and rhino conservation due to its size and habitat. But it wasn't given the same level of protection as Kaziranga and now there are barely any tigers surviving there. We don't even know if they are resident tigers or transient ones from the Bhutan side.

Same is the story of Simlipal and Srisailam. Both very large tiger reserves, 3000 km2 or more, but not many tigers. Panna and Sariska, also tiger reserves, lost all of their tigers to poachers. The biggest tragedy is that some of the largest tiger reserves in India are the least well managed, since they come under relatively poor Central & Eastern states.

So there is habitat, but poaching has made it impossible for tigers to claim them. Effective protection is the need of the hour.

Btw, you are wrong about Corbett. Not only has it got the largest tiger population in India, it also has the highest density per km2. Kazi comes a close second.

When Project Tiger was initiated in 1972, India only had an estimated 1700 tigers left. Obviously, there was much more forest cover in India then, but that didn't save the tigers from being hunted to near extinction. Reply