Last of the royal Bengal tigers to fade away in ten years

A group of Italian tourists, still bleary-eyed after the overnight train from Chittagong, Bangladesh's big port city in the Southeast, stare back at the tiger poster glaring down on them as they sip their morning tea.

Other photos on the wall display the wildlife of the Sundarbans - a herd of spotted deer, a sea otter catching fish, some water birds, a monitor lizard and a crocodile sunning itself on the muddy river bank. But it was the tiger that clearly attracted their attention.

The tiger was supposed to be the highlight of their ten-day trip to Bangladesh, and if they were lucky they would catch a glimpse of it and shoot it on videotape, or at least snap a photo to show their friends and relative back home.

But time was running out. Soon they would be back at their humdrum desks in the industrial cities of Turin or Milan, and the gold and the emerald rice paddies would be but a dream with only photos to jog their memories of time and tigers.

''Hurry up, Sylvia,'' bellows the red-headed tour leader. ''Hurry up,'' she naggingly persists half in jest, ''or we'll miss the tigers.''

If time is running out for the tourists, it is also running out for the tiger. Cat specialist Peter Jackson, in a recent global status report on panthera tigris, grimly predicted that ''The end of the tiger is in sight, possibly within ten years, although some may linger on for a time.''

Only last December, The Bangladesh Observer published an article headlined Sundarbans resources being plundered'. The report claimed that the number of royal Bengal tigers, the pride of Bangladesh, is being greatly reduced due to random poaching.

The famous feline adorns Bangladesh's currency notes, appearing in the watermarks.

Although the author of the article estimated the tiger population of the Sundarbans to be about 600, the assistant district forest officer in Khulna reckoned the actual number to be much lower, perhaps half.

The last official tiger census counted only 350 of the striped cats in Bangladesh. Kailash Sankhala of India's faltering Project Tiger estimated only 450 tigers in the whole Sundarban area (about 5,770 square kilometre), of which two thirds falls in Bangladesh. The remainder is in India.

Few creatures have enthralled the human imagination as the tiger. At least in the Indian subcontinent, having inspired and enriched its various mythologies, the tiger is considered to be the spirit of the jungle.

For English-speaking readers, the tiger is best remembered as the wily, anthropomorphised Shere Khan in Rudyard Kipling's 'jungle book'. In Bengal folklore, the tiger is often depicted as foolish, stupid and wicked, an attitude which may, in part, account for its impending demise.

The tiger's natural habitat once stretched across Asia from the Caspian Sea to Indonesia. However, with the extinction of the Caspian tiger in 1970, the Indian subcontinent is now its westernmost range, and with the few remaining in China, Nepal, Indo-China and the Russian far-east, the royal Bengal tiger remains the last, most prominent sub-species.

According to statistics of the Wildlife Protection Society of India, about 115 tigers were poached in 1995, though experts believe that the figure is much higher than officially reported.

The voracious demand for tiger bones for Chinese medicines has resulted not only in the near extinction of the species in China, but in the lucrative trade in contraband from the Indian subcontinent, including Nepal and Bangladesh. In the Indian Sundarbans, the demoralised forest guards are often shot at.

''The situation is alarming,'' warns Tariq Aziz of the World Wildlife Fund, commenting on the human encroachment of the natural habitat of endangered species such as the tiger. With the human population of the Indian subcontinent spiralling at more than 2 per cent a year - the combined population of India and Bangladesh surpassed a billion - wild animals such as tigers, elephants and rhinos will soon have no place to go, except pace the cages of urban zoos.

Fortunately, for the tiger at least, its largest concentration of numbers is found in the still largely unpopulated Sundarban habitat, the world's largest littoral mangrove forest where the mouths of the Ganga delta feed into the Bay of Bengal.

The river is said to be the mother of the forest, and for millennia the Ganga (called the Padma in Bangladesh) and Brahmaputra, both originating in the high Himalayas, have been carrying millions of tonnes of silt, and gifted Bengal with its unique mosaic of mangrove forested islands.

The name Sundarbans - which literally means 'beautiful forest' - is said to derive from the sundari tree which is the most common of the mangrove trees which flourish in its muddy saline swamps.

The forests, like the rivers are in perpetual flux. On peak high tide, over half the land is submerged.

Although Bangladesh attracts few tourists - compared to its neighbours India and Myanmar - the habitat of the royal Bengal tiger is one of its major potential attractions. Most tourists with limited time and money must join a group and cruise by boat through the Sundarbans. It remains to be seen, however, whether tourism will be a bane or a boon towards saving the tiger.

UNI