As a nation, we have fallen from grace. Where we once led the world in the arena of nature conservation, we now stand accused of letting down not merely the tiger, but virtually all wildlife. Bittu Sahgal and Jennifer Scarlott, the International Director of Conservation initiatives for Sanctuary Magazine,  trace the descent of Project Tiger. While pointing out how millions of young Indians are struggling to protect natural India, they highlight the culpability of politicians, who not only threaten wild species, but the subcontinent itself, which is poised on the verge of a deforestation-related climate change disaster.

It was mid-morning at Ranthambhore’s Rajbagh lake and we had given up on seeing a tiger. Our consolation was the lake itself, its serenity broken only by the family of wild pigs rooting around at its edge. And then, as if conjured from the very air, she appeared, padding silently down to the shoreline in front of the summer palace.

Even from this distance, we could make out her powerful shoulders as she stretched her feline form to drink at the water's edge.

Thirst quenched, the tigress moved toward a small island in the centre of the lake, stepping and hopping from rock to rock, stripes appearing and disappearing amid tall, golden grass. After a brief disappearing act on the island, she re-materialised near our jeep. Finding the waters of Rajbagh irresistible, she drank again.

Tiger vs man
The tranquillity of our moments with this tigress belied the  struggles  of her species’ long history with Homo sapiens. Her ancestors were hunted down through centuries until the contest between man and tiger reached an all time high, utterly desperate and one-sided. By the early 1970s, with the advent of firearms and industrialisation, wholesale slaughter and habitat destruction brought about a dwindling of the cat to numbers a child could count.

Coming to the tiger’s rescue, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi proved to be a wildlife visionary by banning tiger hunting in the 1970s and establishing Project Tiger. Some years of relative peace for the cat paid off in slowly-rising tiger numbers, until our tigress’ direct antecedents could reliably be seen in daylight, fearlessly chasing their prey through the lakes and grasses and forests of Ranthambhore. The tiger’s brief moment in the sun turned to night in the early 1990s, as international poaching syndicates turned their attention to the tigers of the subcontinent. Cats began to disappear from the forests, only to reappear in shipments of wildlife contraband bound from Delhi to Southeast Asian countries. The resurgent illegal trade in wildlife parts  became, seemingly overnight, an overwhelming threat to India's tigers. In combination with the onslaught on India’s wild places by dams, mines, agricultural and forestry projects, nuclear power plants, ad nauseum that her political and business classes view as the only path to ‘development’, tiger numbers began to drop once more, precipitously. Without concerted action on the part of all who care for this beautiful creature and its home, the momentum of events of recent years will seal the tiger’s doom.

Project Tiger
The descent of Project Tiger, began even before the poaching crisis of the 90s, when Rajiv Gandhi assumed his mother’s mantle following her assassination in 1984. Though an avowed nature enthusiast, Gandhi Junior’s advisors ensured that his tenure benefitted Indian industrial interests more than Indian wildlife. Gandhi made rapid incursions into the gains his mother had secured for wild India. Seduced by promises of huge World Bank  loans, he personally cleared the Sardar Sarovar Project, the largest of the infamous Narmada dams that threatened to drown some of the best tiger forests in India. Across the country, throwing the spirit of the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980 to the winds, more than a million hectares of forest lands were converted to commercial and agricultural use in short order. Massive timber operations halted by Mrs Gandhi were restarted. State Forestry Projects began to widen narrow forest roads in preparation for future timber operations.

Then in the early 90s, India’s tigers were hit with a double whammy: concerted international poaching in forests across the length and breadth of the country, and the WB’s India Eco-development Project. This scheme began innocently enough as a well-intentioned outgrowth of the June 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, which created a Global Environment Facility (GEF) to fund efforts to reverse environmental damage in developing countries. The WB, destroyer of nature, quickly insinuated itself as the custodian of GEF funds, and turned the Eco-development Project into a virtual extension of many WB-financed Forestry Projects, whose experts began to earn lucrative consultancies from this new source. Exactly as members of the Project Tiger Steering Committee warned, this proved disastrous for the tiger because it forced forest staff to take their eye off the protection ball and turn towards ‘rural development’ a task normally handled by revenue officials and one that has always been tainted with accusations of corruption.

Little wonder poachers took advantage of the situation and drove the tiger to extinction in so many forested patches in India.