How many tigers are actually left in India? If an advertisement featuring sport personalities like Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Baichung Bhutia is to be believed, India has 1,411 big cats. But the authorities in Delhi say the figure is exaggerated.
At a time when scientific data is increasingly found to be faulty, especially after the fiasco surrounding the vanishing of Himalayan glaciers, it seems the case is no different for tigers.
A day after Union environment and forest minister Jairam Ramesh admitted that India may not have 1,411 tigers, the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), which had carried out a survey, said that it too did not know how the authorities in Delhi reached the figure.
Ramesh had said on Tuesday that the figure of 1,411 was exaggerated. “We never gave the figure of 1,411 to anyone. We had only given an estimation of 1,100-1,600 after the survey. We don’t know how the ministry arrived at that figure. It is not part of our research. If the ministry wants to reject its figures on tiger population, that is not our problem. If someone in the ministry finds a midpoint of the estimates, we can’t do anything about it,” YV Jhala, faculty member of WII, who was part of the tiger census in India, said.
“It is glamourous to quote a figure while speaking in front of a gathering in Delhi, but the fact is that it is impossible to find out the tiger population in India. A tiger census doesn’t happen like that. We can only give estimates and not specific numbers,” Jhala added.
The confusion surrounding tiger numbers deepened after World Wildlife Fund (WWF) used the figure of 1,411 given by the national tiger conservation authority (NTCA) in an advertisement to boost public awareness on the diminishing number of tigers in India. The campaign, featuring Indian cricket team skipper Dhoni, is on air and is being promoted by a telecom company.
“The minister was only trying to say that tiger numbers have gone down since the last census. The figure of 1,411 is an average and it was calculated in 2006. It has been four years since then and now a fresh census is under way,” said Belinda Wright, an expert on tigers.
Since the last census figures came out in 2006, over 127 tigers have died in India. The worst was 2009, when 66 tigers died and the start of 2010 was also not good, with six deaths reported so far.
