Indian tiger may be extinct in five years

The tiger is facing extinction in the next five years and the prospects of conserving them are getting bleaker every day, according to the Panos media report on issues of environment and development.

The report, sent to the Rural Litigation and Entitlement Kendra, a non governmental organisation working in the Doon valley, points out that ''probably the single most high-profile international conservation project around a threatened species today is the effort to save the Indian tiger.''

According to the report, tiger reserves in the country are in deep trouble. At the Ranthambhore National Park, tiger numbers have fallen drastically over the past few years. According to the London-based environmental investigation agency, at least one or two tigers are poached in India every day, the report adds.

''A tiger can be sold for up to $ 15,000 and there are plenty of poachers who will risk everything for that sort of money,'' says Peter Jackson, chairman of the cat specialist group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.

The report further says while Project Tiger seemed a success, ''a degree of official complacency set in after the wild tiger was saved from extinction.'' Their numbers grew from about 1,800 in 1973 to some 4,000 in the early 1980s.

In the 1990s, poaching increased as the demand for tiger body parts surged in some countries of South East Asia. Figures are disputed, but many conservationists agree that there are between 2,500 and 2,750 Indian tigers in the wild, the report says. The Indian government claims that the figure is between 3,000 and 4,750, the report adds.

Panos says although international financial assistance has come into the country to help it renew the campaign to save the tiger, not all of it is good news to conservationists.

At an international symposium on tiger conservation organised earlier this year by the Zoological Society of London, representatives of several Indian NGOs told a World Bank representative that the bank's ecodevelopment project in the country could end up harming efforts to save the tiger.

The $ 67 million project, funded by the bank's global environment facility and the Indian government, includes seven reserves with tiger populations. But NGOs say neither they nor the local people have been consulted.

According to Ashok Kumar, vice-president of the Wildlife Protection Society of India, one of the more controversial proposals of the project is to offer money to people living in and around these reserves. ''We told them that this will have the exact opposite effect -- more people will move in just for the money.'' said Kumar, as quoted in the report.