In two days’ time, in Washington DC, an unsung Indian will receive one of the world’s most prestigious awards. On Tuesday, October 16, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) will give Dr. K. Ullas Karanth of Bangalore its J. Paul Getty Award for Conservation Leadership for the year 2007. Each year the Getty Award recognises a world leader in conservation — last year’s recipient was King Jigme Singhye Wangchuck of Bhutan.
Another champion
Ullas Karanth, who is Director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s India Programme, was recognised for his pioneering leadership as a conservation scientist. So Vishwanathan Anand is not the only world champion India can lay claim to this month. But Ullas Karanth’s triumph, unlike Anand’s, has hardly received any attention in our country, because his life has been dedicated to a precious national resource which has been suffering from neglect and may be threatened with extinction — the Indian tiger.
The vexed debate about the condition of tigers in our country has been compounded by reports that the official figures for India’s tiger population may be seriously exaggerated. The conservationist, Valmik Thapar estimates there are fewer than 1,300 tigers left in our country; even the most optimistic do not place the estimate higher than 3,700. A century ago, there were at least 40,000 in the wild, whereas today we have 28 tiger reserves — one of which, Sariska in Rajasthan, has achieved the dubious distinction of having no tigers left at all. Ullas Karanth’s great contribution has been in the adoption of scientific rigour in the work of tiger conservation. A mechanical engineer turned farmer who went on to study wildlife biology and to cut his methodological teeth on the ground in Nagarahole, Karanth brought in highly sophisticated methods of tiger measurement to the previously erratic process of conducting tiger censuses by counting pugmarks. He enjoys a huge reputation across the globe as one of the world’s most eminent conservation scientists. It is only in India that his achievements remain largely unrecognised.
Dr. Karanth, whom I have recently got to know, probably would not care. Though he is the author of several books on tigers — notably the delightfully readable The Way of the Tiger — recognition matters less to him than the concrete contributions he has made to the conservation of Indian elephants and tigers. These include his pioneering work in the creation of three wildlife protected areas in the Western Ghats; his thoughtful and innovative efforts to promote the voluntary resettlement of local people from tiger habitats in ways that benefit both people and wildlife; and his focus on scientific methods of monitoring and measuring wildlife, especially tigers. “Being science-based,” Karanth says, “means constant self-criticism, continuous monitoring of results and merciless rejection of failed conservation models.”
Room for optimism
Thanks to Ullas Karanth and his colleagues, there may be some good news for Indian tigers. The Wildlife Conservation Society, buoyed by an injection of funds and entrepreneurial energy from a dynamic New York businessman, Michael Cline, has launched a new initiative across Asia confidently called “Tigers Forever”. The lessons learned by Karanth and others are manifest in the Tigers Forever strategy: scientifically monitor the tiger population and its sources of prey, enhance wildlife habitats, protect human interests by generous land acquisition and voluntary resettlement programmes so that people and tigers do not have to compete in the same space, face up to hunting and forest-product issues, educate local communities and push for enlightened national and local policy changes. While the approach is rooted in meeting the ecological needs of the tiger, Karanth and WCS understand that in a country like India, you can only protect tigers by an approach that takes into account the demands that human beings make on Mother Nature. The pressure on the tiger’s habitat is nowhere greater than in India, where tigers have lost 93 per cent of their historic range and only 10 per cent of the country is covered by natural forest.
There has to be strict protection against hunting, encouragement of adequate numbers of prey animals to keep tigers interested (and nourished), and minimising of the potential for conflict with humans by finding forest-dwellers alternative means of livelihood in resettlement areas. This isn’t just theory; all of this has been tried and tested by Ullas Karanth and WCS in India and elsewhere, and proven to work.