India remains the great hope of the world's endangered Bengal tiger population, although more than 100 of these magnificent big cats are killed each year by poachers and desperate farmers trying to protect their livestock from tigers straying from the subcontinent's 50 protected reserves.
Meanwhile, tiger tourism has exploded over the past decade, with more Indian people than tourists visiting the carefully controlled wildlife safaris in the reserves.
Nature Safari India is one of the cornerstones of the industry. Founder, Sharad Kumar Vats, told Lynn Freeman he came up with the idea of tiger tourism because tourism is an industry that employs a lot of people. Rather than having the goal of saving the tiger, it’s about looking after the people who take care of the national parks, he says. “If you look after them, they look after your tigers.
“One tourist in a national park means 11 people employed, so that’s a big number.”
When Kumar Vats started his business, wildlife tourism really only attracted foreigners and there were only a small number of parks for them to visit.
But the numbers of tigers spotted in the wild started to improve by 2005-2006 as more and more resorts were being built around the national parks.
“Now, I’d say that the number of sightings directly relates to the numbers in tourism.”
Tiger tourism is beneficial for the local communties as well, as they were no longer having to rely on the forest to generate income, instead finding work on the safaris. “Bring in more tourism, bring in more money into the area and people become happy.”
However in 2012, the Supreme Court put a short-lived ban on tiger tourism. “Everything was closed.”
“[The government] realised that it’s important to regulate tourism,” he says. Now restrictions are tight, with only 20 percent of a park able to be used for tourism and only a certain number of jeeps allowed in at a time.
The ruling had an unexpected positive impact on the industry as well, and Kumar Vats says that local Indian people who previously had never heard of it realised tiger tourism existed and they became tourists themselves - bringing in a lot of money.
“The last four or five years, the tiger population has gone up by about 30 percent,” he says. There’s now 51 tiger reserves.
Kumar Vats believes that more of the parks need to open in a controlled manner to have a bigger impact on tiger populations.
“Tourism is a kind of unofficial control happening. In some areas where there is no car going in and even the forest department and the staff is limited, they don’t even go in, that is an easy spot for poachers to move in and just pick on the animals. It’s important the tourism is expanded but regulated.”
If you give tigers space, they will multiply, he says. “The only things that can save tigers are tourism.”
