Mumbai:While a lot has been talked about tiger conservation in India, there has not been much emphasis on strengthening forest staff and including communities in the wildlife area in the process.
Adopting a new approach towards tiger conservation, the Tiger Matters programme initiated by the Wildlife Conservation Trust (WCT), in collaboration with the US Agency for International Development (USAID), has 190 anti-poaching campaigns and 88 Special Tiger Protection Forces (STPF) in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh.
It focuses on safeguarding the Central Indian Landscape, home to over 600 tigers, which accounts for 30 per cent of India’s tigers. Along with training forest personnel, the initiative highlights the need to include community livelihood as a major step towards tiger conservation. Through the Tiger Matters Programme, over 4,500 forest guards were trained in wildlife law enforcement and crime prevention techniques. “With the rise in poorly planned development projects and increasing human-wildlife conflict, conservation efforts today need to lay equal emphasis on empowering local communities as well as protecting forests,” said Anish Andheria, President, WCT.
While empowering communities plays a major role in landscape conservation, it is not limited to employment but also a better understanding of the environment. The initiative reached out to more than 29,000 children in over 400 schools through its education intervention. Around 3,300 youth from more than 90 buffer zone villages of protected areas were provided with vocational skills.
“The project aims at creating a wider database of tiger population and movement. We are trying to achieve it by camera trappings, genetic studies and GIS mapping of the landscape,” added Mr. Andheria.
The project is currently conducting India’s largest camera trapping exercise outside of tiger reserves in order to monitor tiger and leopard populations. Around 9,000 square kilometres of area through camera trapping was sampled to monitor tiger movement.
