Wildlife agencies face pressure over missing tigers

Indian Government agencies are putting "pressure" on conservation organisations for highlighting the poaching of tigers in the country, an international wildlife body has said.

"We are facing pressure from government agencies for raising the issue of widespread tiger poaching," Ravi Singh, Secretary General of World Wide Fund for Nature-India told Gulf News yesterday.

The statement follows reports that India's Ministry of Environment discovered an undercover operation in the Sunderbans to poach tigers.

The Ministry of Environment has accused a WWF-India employee of posing as a poacher and offering mo-ney to procure a tiger skin, the Indian Express newspaper reported yesterday.

The report said Dr Rajesh Gopal, country head of Project Tiger, wrote a letter on April 26 to Ravi Singh objecting to the undercover operation.

The letter alleged that the WWF-India employee offered Rs50,000 (Dh4,209) to residents of the area for a tiger skin.

The report quoted another letter written to Ravi Singh by A.K. Raha, director of Sunderbans Biosphere Reserve objecting to the alleged operation. Both the letters said the reserve officials were kept in dark about the operation.

In his letter, Dr Gopal wrote: "It goes without saying, such attempts would do more harm than good by luring people to crime."

But Singh, talking to Gulf News, denied the WWF-India carried out or authorised any such operation in the biosphere reserve — home to the Royal Bengal tiger.

He also ruled out the possibility of any WWF-India employee acting on his own to procure tiger skin.

Singh said the WWF-India is receiving reports of widespread poaching of tigers from "almost all parts of the country".

"Trade in animal skin and parts are being reported from national parks across the country," Singh said.

But, he said, there was no "specific report on poaching in the Sunderbans".

According to some official estimates, there are 270 tigers in the reserve.

"We are trying to help the government in conservation efforts but it is not as easy as it seems," Singh said.

Task force

He lauded steps taken by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to stop poaching of wild animals.

The prime minister last month set up a task force after the entire tiger population of a sanctuary in the western state of Rajasthan was found missing.

Later, a government committee found that most of the missing tigers in Sariska sanctuary were killed by poachers. The committee blamed forest officials for conniving with smugglers.

The WWF-India was founded in 1969 with the aim of ensuring conservation of the country's wildlife and wild habitats. Today, the organisation is not only the country's largest voluntary body in the field of conservation, it has also grown into a countrywide network, its website says.