How many tigers do the Sunderbans have?

By Sujoy Dhar

Kolkata, Feb 13 (IANS) The tiger does not burn bright in the Indian jungles any more. But as the tragic decline in the big cat population becomes official, a mystery shrouds their number in India's largest tiger habitat, the Sundarbans. Are there 279 tigers there, or 75?

According to the latest tiger census released by the government Tuesday, their number stands at 1,411, a dramatic fall from 3,642 in the 2001-02 census.

The latest census did not cover the Sundarbans. While releasing it, head of the National Tiger Conservation Authority Rajesh Gopal said the number in the Sundarbans would have to be verified through radio collaring.

The last time a census was done, officials in the West Bengal forest department had said there were 249 tigers in the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve (STR) and 279 in greater Sundarbans.

That number was based on pugmarks of individual tigers. But analysing the same pugmarks, the Indian Statistical Institute said in July 2006 there were only 75 tigers in the Sundarbans.

The ISI was asked by the West Bengal government to develop a software programme to process field data on tiger pugmarks. But once it came out with its figure of 75, the state government was quick to trash the report and find fault with the software.

ISI professor Debasis Sengupta, who headed the controversial data analysis project, told IANS Tuesday: "The validation was done on the basis of data provided by the forest department itself. There are doubts over all statistical methods and there are margins of error. It was not an exception here but our method of analysis was not wrong.

"There can be improvement over our analysis and reduction of margin of error. Actually the government had provided us more pugmarks for analysis than was required. If the pugmarks they had provided us were fewer the analysis would have been better and margin of error lower," Sengupta said, as he stood by the ISI analysis.

Analysing 1,044 pugmarks collected in the 2004 Sundarban tiger census, the ISI software rejected 314 as overlaps or duplicates. Some of the duplicate pugmarks were found hundreds of kilometres apart.

Forest department officials in West Bengal had said the rejections were arbitrary.

"First of all this software is now in development stage. There may be lots of defects that we have to see. All of a sudden we cannot say this software is right. They have only test run it. We have to see what kind of data they have used," an official from the Sunderbans had said.

"This time the census will be conducted by the Wildlife Institute of India (WII). They have been given the mandate. The census will be a combination of digital photography of pugmarks (instead of human collection like before), radio collaring and camera traps. Given the difficult terrain of Sundarbans it has to be a combination of all three," Sunderbans Tiger Reserve Field Director Niraj Singhal told IANS Wednesday.

However, according to Sengupta, the WII, which was associated with the latest tiger census in the rest of the country, did not want to be a part of the exercise in the Sundarbans.

"WII scientists said Sundarbans is a different terrain and the ISI should take charge of the analysis here. But we have not heard from the West Bengal forest officials yet," Sengupta said.

Tiger conservationists and NGO workers also feel that Sundarbans has fewer tigers than projected earlier.

"If tiger in India feels a little safer then it is in the Sundarbans. The reason is the terrain where poaching is as difficult as census work. But we can say from experience and the frequency of tiger sightings and their prey that the tiger population in the area is lower than was officially projected," said Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI) honorary director Col. Shakti Ranjan Banerjee.

The world will have to wait to know the fate of the Royal Bengal Tiger in the Sundarbans, almost 10,000 sq km of marshlands and mangrove forests along the coast of the Bay of Bengal, and one of the last surviving natural habitats of the tiger.