The ministry of environment and forests has set up a Tiger Conservation Fund to benefit local communities living in the forest reserves. A fund of Rs 900 crores will be transferred yearly to states in which the 39 tiger reserves are located to be used for livelihood activities.
“While the Jim Corbett National Park would receive Rs 3 crores to be transferred to the Uttarakhand state government, Rs 4 crores would be transferred to the Kanha Park to be used by the Madhya Pradesh state government,” environment minister Jairam Ramesh said. “The state governments at present had no stake in Project Tiger. The big challenge facing the Centre was to give them a stake in this project,” he said.
“Already 400 youth belonging to the Chenchu tribe had been recruited as forest guards in the Nagarjungsagar tiger reserve while 50 Ban Gujjar youth had been recruited in the Corbett reserve and similar steps been taken in the Nilgiri reserve also,” he claimed.
“We also need to redefine the relationship of the forest department with larger community. The traditional antagonistic relationship in which forest department saw itself as being the only custodians of the forest had to end and local communities also be made stake holders,” Mr Ramesh said.
Commenting on the Forest Rights Act, he said, “Nine lakh individual titles had been given out so far but only 27 community titles. There was a need for more community titles to be distributed,” the minister said speaking at a symposium on the “Future of Bengal Tiger”. Mr Ramesh expressed confidence that the tiger population would increase when the new tiger census was out in November. “I don’t know what we are going to see. We are just receiving the data from states. I seriously hope there is good news about it when the results come out in the first week of November,” Mr Ramesh said. According to latest census conducted by the Wildlife Institute of India, there are only 1,411 big cats left in the 39 tiger reserves. In the last seven months this year, at least 20 tigers have died against 66 deaths reported in 2009.
“Almost 60 per cent of the wild tigers in the world are in India. And this has been possible because of sustained efforts put under Project Tigers for conservation of the big cats,” he said.