La National Tiger Conservation Authority est devenue une structure parasitaire, qui gêne l'action des protecteurs compétents et y substitue son incompétence. L'analyse de Valmik Thapar* dans "The Hindustan Times" de ce jour.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/more-tiger-conservation-bodies-must-be-enablers/story-bWsE3AHwey4ZI4AuJRHbtL.html
IN 1992 I joined the steering committee of Project Tiger at the invitation of Kamal Nath, the then minister of environment and forests. He made it clear to all of us that non-governmental experts who served the committee should travel extensively to all the tiger reserves, solve their problems and enable them to flourish. Till 2007, I did nothing else and our committee was known to be a bunch of experts that could really help. We worked through many a crisis including the extinction of tigers in Sariska and Panna. I served on the Prime Minister’s Tiger Task Force in an effort to usher in change. But there were many in the government who wanted more powers for the federal structure and soon came the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA). It was born in 2006-2007 and was empowered under the Wildlife Protection Act. A poorly drafted document now purported to give the federal structure of the NTCA enormous powers of providing the states with mandatory advice. Instead of an enabler, the structure created became an unquestionable authority.
Over the next few years, huge compendiums of advisories were created for the ever-increasing tiger reserves. They were rarely site-specific. They generalised and those giving advice were seldom those who understood the tiger’s needs. It was as if the federal structure was on a power trip. Many of those who ruled the NTCA had forgotten the earlier years. Now targets became vital and more and more tiger reserves were declared with either no tigers in them or with less than five tigers in them such as Mukundra. No one was held answerable for the debacles in Panna and Sariska.
What the NTCA forgot was that in the field were forest officers like themselves doing a hard day’s work. The last thing they needed was advice that made no sense. After all, the people giving advice were neither especially trained in tiger conservation, nor wildlife management. All that these advisories did was to create confusion in the field. Yet, because of some of our independent scientists such as Dr Ullas Karanth*, our methods of counting improved and our estimations of tiger numbers became more accurate. Dr Karanth worked hard in the NTCA for this change. The tragedy is the scant respect the NTCA has given him.
* Valmik Thapar et Ullas Karanth sont les deux plus grands spécialistes du tigre en Inde. Ils en connaissent et comprennent mieux que quiconque le niveau réel et la dynamique des populations de grands félins, dont ils sont, à ce titre, les meilleurs prospectivistes.
Il ne fait aucun doute que la NTCA va s'arroger tout le mérite des résultats du recensement des populations de tigres indiens cette année, qui seront publiés en janvier 2019. Ceux ci mettront en évidence la présence de plusieurs milliers de grands félins striés et lancéolés (très probablement entre 3000 et 4000). La nouvelle fera sensation dans le monde entier, qui se pamera d'aise face à "l'efficacité des autorités indiennes en la matière", et "les merveilleuses perspectives de moyen et long terme pour le grand prédateur", ce qui est à la fois un leurre et un feu de paille. En effet : 1. Les résultats auraient été encore nettement plus spectaculaires sans leur intervention. Ullas Karanth a démontré qu'une politique intelligente sur les ongulés sauvages permettraient sur le territoire indien tel qu'il est la présence de 10 000 tigres sauvages (voir pour le détail "La forêt des 10 000" mis en ligne le 12 janvier 2017). 2. Cette situation n'est qu'un palier dans la dynamique interne des communautés tigréennes de l'Asie du Sud. Les décennies 2020 et 2030 seront beaucoup plus difficiles et angoissantes, avec un déclin prévisionnel considérable de la démographie tigréenne du fait des structures et méthodes de l'Etat fédéral (voir pour le détail "Vers la croisée des chemins" mis en ligne le 26 novembre 2017").
