The National Tiger Consolation Authority

Five years later, the NTCA has changed little on the ground or in the mind

Tehelka, 11 January, 2013

ON 4 FEBRUARY 2005, two weeks after I reported the local extinction of tigers in Sariska, Project Tiger (PT) chief Rajesh Gopal told the Hindustan Times that a tiger was spotted and tracked by a team from the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) in Sariska. On 7 February, he told The Times of India that reports on missing tigers were “baseless, false and intended to malign the government”. On 29 March, the CBI confirmed the Sariska wipeout.

Less than four years later, in an interview to TOI on 4 December 2008, Gopal took a different line: “Sariska was tragic but it gave us an opportunity to bring about changes. The PM’s office was directly involved, the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau was set up, a scientific tiger estimation method was evolved… While the media highlighted our deficiencies, it also brought about awareness in the common man, in the system.”

But all did not end well for the tiger. The 2006 amendment of the Wildlife (Protection) Act (WLPA), 1972, led to the formation of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) to give more teeth to the PT, which had merely been a fund-disbursing agency. Gopal, director of the PT since 2002, became the first member-secretary of the NTCA in 2006. He still is. Not much has changed since, not on the ground, not in the mind.

Under Section 38 of the amended WLPA, the NTCA can “issue directions in writing to any person, officer or authority for the protection of tiger or tiger reserves and such person, officer or authority shall be bound to comply with the directions”. Various states and agencies have repeatedly ignored the copious letters the NTCA routinely writes, but not a single official has ever been pulled up.

The federal structure of governance does make the NTCA’s job unenviable as forests and wildlife are on the Concurrent List. When the reality of Sariska sunk in, Gopal famously excused himself saying that he was not the “DFO of India”. While divisional forest officers (DFOs) remained responsible for management in their reserves, the formation of a statutory authority was meant to ensure checks and balances. It did not.

The NTCA defended Rajasthan when the state flouted its instruction to ensure genetic compatibility of tigers to be translocated to Sariska. It failed to free the Kosi corridor, defend the integrity of the Corbett tiger reserve and relocate willing Gujjars out of the park because a state forest official refused to stop “plantation work” on the land where the families were to be resettled. It let the railways ministry go scot-free when trains ran over jumbos inside tiger reserves.

Few states take the NTCA seriously. Some openly renounced its tiger census results in 2011. It could not rein in state forest bosses for flouting its instructions on declaring man-eaters. It failed to stall an ill-conceived move by the Karnataka government that declared BRT a tiger reserve (the same state threw away NTCA’s in-principle approval for Kudremukh as a tiger reserve). The list is long.

In 2009, the NTCA set up a committee to study a crisis-ridden Simlipal in Odisha and suggest ways forward. The report gathered dust till a spate of poachings forced it to form another panel in 2010, which reiterated the recommendations. The NTCA set up a committee with the state wildlife boss at its helm, and seasoned conservationists and senior cops who successfully tackled wildlife crime as members, to monitor the firefighting measures for six months.

“The state simply did not allow the monitoring committee to function while the NTCA watched helplessly. The result is continued poaching in Simlipal where elephants alone have suffered more than a dozen casualties since,” says Biswajit Mohanty, a member of the committee and the National Board for Wildlife. Much of Simlipal still remains outside the department’s effective control.

TO ENSURE “greater coordination between the forest and civil administrations”, the first Simlipal committee recommended in 2009 that “a serious knowledgebased effort, with professional support from technically competent agencies… should guide the identification of candidate villages for relocation” with “locally appropriate strategies”. Since the NTCA spends hundreds of crores on the scheme, this approach was appropriate for the entire country to make voluntary relocations fair and speedy.

Instead, the NTCA banked on state forest staff and constituted several review panels. “Our report on the village relocation process was not made public and then there was another review by a different panel. Frequent monitoring helps only if follow-up action is taken. Otherwise the money is wasted on numerous evaluations mostly by retired forest officials and conservationists who rarely speak out of line,” points out a biologist who served on many such committees.

But transparency has never been the NTCA’s strong point. “Overtly dependent on the convenient sarkari science of the WII, the NTCA even resisted scientific scrutiny of its methods of extrapolating field data,” said a former WII researcher associated with the 2011 census, adding that the estimation process may gain more credibility in its Phase IV as private institutes have been made partners.

Ironically, pumping huge funds for village resettlement and this new estimation method are the two major achievements the NTCA flaunted in its recent report. But there are other parameters of NTCA’s own to measure its success.

In 2005, the PT did its first Management Effectiveness Evaluation (MEE) in 28 tiger reserves. Five years on, the second evaluation showed that the number of ‘poor’ reserves remained constant at seven. Of the rest, the ‘very good’ and ‘good’ categories increased by 4 percent and 3 percent, respectively, and the ‘satisfactory’ decreased by 7 percent.

If that appears like some improvement, consider the absurdity of such evaluation. In 2005, Panna was rated ‘very good’ when tigers were at the brink of local extinction there. The severely compromised Simlipal was also in the top category. Buxa, another potentially zero-tiger reserve saved by floaters walking in from Bhutan, was labelled ‘good’. Remember, this was after Sariska.

In 2010, one expected the NTCA to be realistic. But even the second MEE rated Buxa as ‘good’. It found Simlipal in a ‘satisfactory’ condition when the NTCA’s own panels were struggling to save the reserve. Of the 30 parameters that the MEE uses, the strongest point of our reserves is apparently protection strategy and assessment of threats. Yet, poaching numbers scale new highs every year.

The MEE identified the weakest points as inadequacy of trained manpower and deployment, tiger conservation plan, habitat management and village relocation planning, lack of stakeholder participation and livelihood support to local communities. Yet, overall, 70 percent of our tiger reserves are apparently in ‘very good’ or ‘good’ conditions.

To be fair, the NTCA’s special status has withstood the pro-industry thrust of our governance in recent years. “It has also framed a few sound protocols — translocation or conflict-management manuals, for example — but few states are responsible enough to implement those. The NTCA rarely takes a stand. It’s been inconsistent even before the court of law,” rues a veteran conservationist. Others venture some explanation.

“The average age of the NTCA’s independent members is over 65 and their role is ceremonial. But the member-secretary is junior (in the IFS cadre) to most state forest chiefs who treat him like one. Also, a lot has happened during Gopal’s decade-long tenure. How can he fix accountability if he himself has never been accountable?” asks a former member of the PT standing committee.

In its report, the NTCA claimed notification of a number of new tiger reserves as its biggest achievement. But will the credit for bringing more area — about 8,000 sq km — under the NTCA’s watch compensate for the ignominy of losing tigers from at least 21,000 sq km of its former habitat in India since 2006-07 when the NTCA was formed?