Save Tigers

Save Tigers-Start Acting now!!

1:15 AM |

Posted by Arpanjot Singh Chawla |

Well this is a very serious topic for me. I always knew that the tiger population in our country is dwindling fast but i got to know about 2 days back that there are barely 1000 Tigers in the entire country. I never knew that there was such a strong animal activist in me but the thought has really, really disturbed me a lot. I mean the thought that i may
never be able to see this gorgeous animal after about 10-15 years really scares me a lot.Its one of the most beautiful and majestic animal in the world and even the thought that it may
extinct because of the stupid human beings really pisses me a lot.
I know you guys might be thinking that although you feel a lot for the cause you dont know what to do or dont know how to go about it. Well, even i used to think the same thing always but if you have the will to do something for a cause, you will find out ways and do it.

I feel in an extremely strong way for this wonderful cause and was finding ways to do
something. Well for starters you can “SPREAD THE MESSAGE”. All my friends who will read this blog can help by spreading this thought to as many people as you can. It wont take you more then 5 minutes to do it but will go a long way in helping to save the animal. Please its a sincere request from me. Also if you dont mind spending about 3 rupees, you can sms TIGER to 56388 or visit NDTV.COM and sign the online petition to save the tiger. It wont take much of your time to do this.

I dont know how many people i will be able to reach or how many will take this
seriously.Some may even laugh at me or feel that “how can my message make any difference”.But it will. Even if you feel that your message wont make any difference but the least you can do is TRY. Its our last chance or else we may lose this wonderful, exotic animal forever.

India has been home to Tigers for a very long time. If one has seen a Tiger they are just awed by the beauty, power and aura of the magnificent beast. Tigers were found all over India and still as many as 16 States of India are home to the Tigers. The latest census report released on 12th. February, 2008 by the Government of India reports that there are only 1411 tigers left. The population of the Tiger has been reduced by nearly 50% and that too in a period of 6 to 7 years.
It is time that emergency and drastic steps are taken to save the pride of jungle and pride of India from becoming extinct.
The causes of the fast decrease in the Tiger population are well known both by the
government and common people. The increasing pressure on Tiger habitats due to
agriculture,industrialization and degradation and fragmentation of natural habitats, forests and natural grasslands are one of the main reasons for the decrease of Tiger population and for that matter all wildlife in India. The immediate effect of this is lack of natural food and habitat causes the wild animals to come out of the forest area. This tends to increase the conflicts between the humans and animals. The other reason for the population decrease is Poaching, which has been on rise recently. There is a slogan I have been hearing for quit some time, " If the buying stops, the selling will stop". I think the rich people who are the only one who can afford buying the skins for their fancies are probably deaf, as they cannot seem to hear the slogan.

The poaching problem should be dealt with strictly by the Government of India and the concerned State Governments. The Forest Department of India is severely understaffed and they do not have the modern weapons and technology to protect the Forest areas. The laws for the animal protection should be revised.
The poachers should be shot dead on sight. How can a forest guard armed with a stick [danda] or an outdated rifle fight the heavily armed poachers to protect the animals. It is time the Government of India acts urgently.
The people of India should also join hands to save the Tiger. NDTV India has started a
campaign to save the Tigers,TIGERS ARE ON the threshold of extinction. According to WWF, Tigers are amongst the ten most endangered species in the world. Over the last century more than 95 per cent of the Tiger population has been wiped out & three sub-species are already extinct. Less than 3500 tigers remain in the wild today with around 50 per cent in India and their numbers are declining fast. The world is abuzz with news, views and moves in a bid to save the Tiger. With just 1411 tigers left in India as per the last count, the government is worried on how to save the national animal. And thus from cellular phone companies to potato chip manufacturers,every other big brand is being roped in to promote the cause.- a cause that is one of the prime concerns of the nation right now.But why do we save the tigers? This articles talks about the reason to behind the worldwide movement to save the big cats. In simple words this piece reasons out why you and me, the common man should be interested in saving the tigers.

Not only is the tiger a beautiful animal but it is also the indicator of the forest's
health. Saving the tiger means we save the forest since the tiger cannot live in places
where trees have vanished and in turn secure food and water for all. If we make sure tigers live, we will have to make sure that deer, antelope and all other animals that the tiger eats or its prey base live. To make sure that these herbivores live, we must make sure that all the trees, grass and other plants that these prey animals need for food are protected.In short, in this way the whole forest gets saved! Saving the tiger means indirectly saving the forests and in turn saving the environment that is reeling under global warming due to massive deforestation. Felling trees takes away the precious soil, leaving behind a wasteland. The soil jams up our lakes and dams, reducing their ability to store water. By destroying the tiger's home, we not only harm tigers, but also ourselves. The tiger thus becomes the symbol for the protection of all species on our earth since it is at the top of the food-chain. This is why we sometimes call the tiger, an apex predator and an indicator of our ecosystem's health. In short, saving the tiger means saving the earth.
Save tigers,
save our earth!
Currently the countries of the world are on the way of the development,
development like changing world into modern and more facilitate environment such as growing of construction business. Before more years the earth is bounded by greenery, but today that is one the way to lost. Number of the forests is reduced on the earth, so we are facing effect of global warming that is the change of climate
on the world.

One look to the India, same situation is here. India is also growing in the
development.There are number of the forests in the India can be reduced, that affects the live life of animals, birds. Everyone of the world come together for protect live life.
Tiger is the national animal of India. Tiger shows strength and huge power of India. Tiger is the pride of India. Tiger is the Indian pride so its time for every Indian comes together for taking steps for saving the tiger in India.
Today the world is developed with powerful technology so you can use the many techniques to save the tigers in India like sms, blogs, articles, advertisement. This process becomes one of the most effective steps to give sound to the Indians for saving tiger life.

EARLY this year, a warning was sounded that there were no tigers in the Sariska reserve in Rajasthan. Soon it became clear that many of the other tiger reserves fared no better, raising serious questions about the practice of tiger conservation and wildlife management in the country.

If the crisis had to be tackled, the real situation in the reserves had to be understood. A Tiger Task Force was set up in April by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to probe the disappearance of the tigers in Sariska. The panel submitted its report earlier in August, along with a dissent note by one of its members. The primary difference was essentially over ways to manage the reserves and conserve the tiger. The people's concern about the issue was heightened by the fundamental differences between the dissenting member and the rest of the Task Force.Public concern about the dwindling tiger population is not new in India. In the late 1960s, the situation of the big cat in India had attracted world-wide attention. Following this, India's first Task Force on tigers was constituted under the chairmanship of Dr. Karan Singh, a keen conservationist and a Rajya Sabha member at the time. Its report, submitted in 1972, formed the blueprint for India's tiger conservation programme called Project Tiger.

In the 1970s, eight tiger reserves were set up in different ecological systems. Each had human settlements in them, which brought enormous pressure on the reserves and the conservation programme. Thus the first Task Force, in an attempt to restrict human activity within the reserves, designated the core of each reserve as a national park and banned all human activity there; the rest of the reserve was termed the buffer area and could sustain human activity. The idea was to relocate people from the core areas, but they could coexist with the cats in the buffer areas.

Since then, 28 tiger reserves have been created across the country. But two Task Forces and 30 years later, the problem of coexistence still persists. In fact, it has worsened. People continue to live in both the core and the buffer areas, the resettlement processes seem to have hardly taken off, and more people have moved into the reserves for various reasons, including deforestation, land degradation and poverty.

THE reports of tigers vanishing from the Sariska reserve came in December 2004. In March 2005, in its interim report, the Wildlife Institute of India confirmed that there were indeed no tigers in Sariska. The Prime Minister then asked the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to probe the matter.According to the CBI report, since 2002 poachers have been killing tigers in the reserve; the last of the six big cats were killed in 2004. The CBI pointed to the involvement of the local people. A Tiger Task Force comprising five eminent environmentalists, ecologists and conservationists was soon set up, with Sunita Narain, Director of the Centre for Environment and Science, as the chairperson. The Task Force was to look into Sariska's problem in particular and find out if the problem extended to the other reserves as well.

The Task Force was asked to suggest measures to strengthen tiger conservation; improve the methods of tiger counting and forecasting; place data on tiger conservation in the public domain; work out a new reserves management paradigm; and induce local communities, forest staff and tiger reserve managers to help in the conservation of tigers.According to the Task Force report, Sariska is a pointer to the total collapse of institutions and management systems. The main issue, it points out, is not only of saving the tiger but doing it in the Indian situation, where people have been living inside forests for generations.

While pointing out that forest-dwellers should be relocated wherever possible to ease the biotic pressure on the forests and tigers, the report recommends coexistence between man and animal in other areas owing to the scarcity of land and the paucity of funds (the relocation of all families living inside the 28 tiger reserves is estimated to cost Rs.11,508 crores).

The report states: "The protection of the tiger is inseparable from the protection of the forests it roams in. But the protection of these forests is itself inseparable from the fortunes of people who, in India, inhabit forest areas." The report therefore recommends: "The habitat must be shared between the people and the tigers, so that both can coexist, as they must. The poverty of one, otherwise, will be the destruction of the other."But conservationists who brook no human-tiger coexistence within the reserve areas, argue that the premise of continued coexistence over vast landscapes where tigers thrive ecologically, and people thrive economically, is a recipe for disaster. The Task Force recommendation to relocate people from the priority villages and to devise strategies for coexistence in the other villages, they say, is a bundle of contradictions. They point out that the inherent contradictions in the solution would only lead to further degradation of the tiger habitat.According to them, many communities have lived in equilibrium within forest habitats in the past. But those were times when fewer people lived in the forests and used the resources purely for their own consumption. But today, the numbers of forest-dwellers have gone up and with forest areas shrinking, they put tremendous pressure on the forests and the tigers.

Conservationists argue that each tiger needs to eat at least 50 cow-size animals a year to survive, and if a tiger has to share space with cows and people, the conflict between tiger and man will be eternal and perennial, detrimental to both. They argue that the areas falling within the reserves - barely 1 per cent of the country's land area - should be made inviolate and people living within these areas must be relocated. This, they say, is the only way to resolve the issue and save the tiger.

But the Task Force report argues that nearly half of the tiger population, in fact, lives outside the reserves. It also points out that several families from the 80 villages near the reserves, which were relocated in the past, have returned to the forests. This, the conservationists say, is because of the failure of the resettlement schemes and the way they were implemented. According to conservation and wildlife film-maker Shekar Dattatri (The Hindu, August 13, 2005), a decentralised process, with realistic budgets and involving good local non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and the handholding of the settlers until they find their feet outside the reserve areas can save the tigers and improve the lives of the people.

The Task Force report, while agreeing that relocation of all forest dwellers is the ideal solution, wonders where the funds would come from, particularly considering that 1,500 villages (66,516 families) still lie within the reserve areas and hardly 80 villages (2,904 families) have been relocated in the past 30 years. At the government-stipulated norm of Rs.1 lakh to relocate a family, the cost works out to Rs.665 crores plus land cost (Rs.11,508 crores at an enhanced rate of Rs.2.5 lakh for a family, including the land cost, which will be Rs.9,645 crores). Contrast this with the Rs.373 crores spent on Project Tiger by both the Central and the States governments in the past 30 years.Conservationists point to such reserves as the Bhadra in Karnataka as good relocation projects, which can be emulated. The report, however, stresses the fact that the Bhadra reserve had spent Rs.8.3 lakhs (including the land cost) to relocate each family. While even Rs.1 lakh to relocate one family is hard to put together, it is difficult to imagine how the country can set aside funds at Rs.8.3 lakh a family for the 1,500 villages located within the reserve areas. Apart from the money, the administration and logistics of relocation are crucial factors, particularly as hardly any land is available for relocation, the report says.

Conservationists argue that the welfare of the communities living inside the forests cannot be ensured by a one-size-fits-all solution. There is a need to devise pragmatic, area-specific solutions that take into account the aspirations of the local people as well as the precarious situation of the reserve areas.

Though there were once as many as 150,000 tigers in the world, there are now only about4,000-5,000. Of the original eight species of tigers, only three are still in existence.Today, there are about 2,500 of the Indian Royal Bengal tigers left. There are also 1,000 Indo-Chinese tigers, 300 Siberian tigers, 300 Sumatran tigers and 20 South China tigers.As a result, the Indian tigers seem to be the most likely to survive in the future. However,it
will even be difficult for them, and their chance of survival might be quite low.Every day,one Indian tiger dies. If this rate of death is allowed to continue, all species of tigers throughout the world will be extinct by 2010.

To prevent this scenario, the Save-the-Tiger Campaign and Project Tiger have successfully created tiger reserves and convinced the Indian government to ban tiger hunting. In the longer term, the groups hope to educate the Indian people about the threat of the extinction of the tigers so that they can help to ensure the tiger's survival.
In an effort to save the remaining tigers in India, the Indian conservation group Tiger
Trust (TT) has begun to work to help the tigers in India's Kanha and Bandhavgarh tiger reserves.Currently, India's tiger population is being seriously threatened by poaching and territory loss. Many traditional medicine markets require tigers, and the growing population of people and cattle in India are taking over land that had been formerly occupied by tigers.formerly occupied by tigers.