India’s successful Tiger conservation numbers have been a triumph of Project Tiger and the Indian Government has supported Project Tiger this year with an 80% hike in it’s budget.
Painting the fiscal budget green this year – a total of Rs 2,250 crore has been allocated by the Indian Government to the Environment – an increase of around Rs 600 crore will be funded by the clean energy tax on Coal hiked from Rs 200 to Rs 400 per tonne.
From the tax, called the National Clean Energy Fund (NCEF), Rs 300 crore will be allocated to Project Tiger – up from Rs 168 crore. After last year’s disappointing 15 per cent budget cuts for the Tiger conservation project, this is a welcome move.
The huge increase in funds for 2016-17, still keeps with the condition, introduced last year, that the respective states contribute 40% of the non-recurring expenditure on tiger reserves.
The population of tigers in India has increased from 1,706 in 2011 to 2,226 in 2014, leaving India as home to 70% of the global wild tiger population.
Karnataka has the highest number of tigers with 408 tigers followed by 340 in Uttarakhand, 308 in Madhya Pradesh, 229 in Tamil Nadu, 190 in Maharashtra, 167 in Assam, 136 in Kerala and 117 in Uttar Pradesh.
The government has highlighted four anti-poaching measures – village relocation, special tiger force, building of new infrastructure and use of innovative technologies – as reasons for the jump in tiger numbers.
But there are still sanctuaries where wages for forest staff — who are at the frontline of wildlife protection, are not paid their wages on time, where there are no vehicles or boats to patrol the reserves, where if there are vehicles and boats, there is no fuel to run them because budgets are small, and rarely reach the reserves on time.
Conservationists hope the budget increase will help alleviate some of these problems.