In the eye of the tiger

This little book by Valmik Thapar, published just before his death on May 31 this year, distils the great tiger conservationist's half-century of writing and studying the big cat in one of its prime habitats in Ranthambore National Park.

- KANIKA DATTA

It is part of an Essential India Editions series that, according to the publishers, seeks to "explore a foundational aspect of the country in new and thought-provoking ways." The Mysterious World of Tigers can be read as a celebration of Project Tiger, the 52-year-old programme to save India's national animal, the Royal Bengal Tiger, from extinction.

Thapar's brusque and persistent advocacy in the corridors of power played no small part in its success.

Credit must go to the publishers for recognising tiger conservation as a "foundational aspect" of the country.

The fact that a land of India's population density hosts the world's largest tiger population in the wild must rank as one of the country's foremost achievements, on a par, in terms of the immense collateral benefits of preserving biodiversity, with the Green Revolution and Operation Flood.

From that perspective, Thapar, who has partly dedicated this book to his mentor and Project Tiger guru Fateh Singh Rathore, captures the achievements best in the last chapter "The tiger in India has fared well," he writes,...

"India still has about 2,500 to 3,000 tigers in pockets of habitat across the land. Given that this same land has to support 1.4 billion people, whom tigers have to coexist with, this is a remarkable feat."

But far from being self-congratulatory, Thapar acknowledges, with characteristic bluntness, that "management strategies are shoddy most of the time".

Sadly, his beloved Ranthambore exemplifies these deficiencies, mainly on account of the mismanagement of tiger-human conflicts that claimed the lives of two human victims just this year.

This is a tragic consequence of the strategy of providing tigers with live bait, making them semi-domesticated and over-familiar with humans.

Thapar does not mention the reason for this decision, which contradicts all tenets of wildlife management.