On November 9, just as the winter tourist rush kicks off in MP (also home to the country's biggest and most popular tiger resorts), the Supreme Court will hear a special leave petition calling for a ban on tourism near the state's tiger reserves. 

A Bhopal-based NGO has filed the petition and is pursuing the matter after failing to get a favourable verdict at the Jabalpur bench of the Madhya Pradesh High Court earlier this year. "Protection of the tiger is paramount. Human activity should be confined to the buffer zones in a controlled manner. 

But the lodges and tour operators violate the law by entering the core area of the reserves," says Ajay Dubey, who heads the outfit. If implemented, the ban will be a body blow to the state's tourism industry, and could spur other activists to pursue a similar approach in other parts of the country. 

Tourist inflow into jungle resorts could reduce to a trickle, affecting the livelihood of thousands of people who depend on tourism around these jungles. 

But such a move could be a huge reprieve for the tiger, whose population has shrunk alarmingly in the past 100 years. At last count, there were 1,706 tigers against close to 40,000 in the early years of the last century. 

Major Campaigns to Save the Tiger 

The depletion has been a major cause for concern of ecologists, and the government and activists have been carrying out major campaigns to save the tiger from becoming extinct. 

The Travel Operators for Tigers India Wildlife Association ( TOFT) and owners of lodges and resorts in the buffer zone of these tiger reserves described the ban as "irrational, hugely dangerous and not based on sound scientific evidence or proof on the ground". 

Julian Matthews, Chairman of Travel Operators for Tigers, a campaigning NGO for better wildlife tourism says, “It’s quite ridiculous that we have got to this position. At a time when well planned wildlife tourism is saving and restoring whole landscapes and saving endangered species across Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and giving locals the opportunity to benefit from wilderness and wildlife, India appears to want to take a completely retrograde step in trying to stop it.”

He goes on, “We have been calling on the authorities for years to set out a comprehensive vision, better policies and greater enforcement for the sustainable development of nature tourism in all its forms, but it just hasn’t happened. Nobody wants to take on the responsibility. So instead they just want to close a perfectly legitimate industry down.”

The reality on the ground is that India’s forests face infinitely greater threats to their survival than anything tourism can throw at them today, including overgrazing, widespread poaching of tigers and their prey, encroachment, illegal mining and wood extraction, continuous fires, a complete lack of prey species, huge shortage of protection staff, low morale and corruption - to name the most obvious threats.  Ex Environment and Forest Minister Jairam Ramesh said at the time of the launch of the recent census in March this year, “Tiger occupancy areas shrunk from 9 million hectares to less than 7.5 million hectares over the last four years. This means that tiger corridors are under severe threat, especially in Central India, in Madhya Pradesh and northern Andhra Pradesh.” 

You only have to look at the evidence to recognise that tourism within India Tiger Parks is not harming tigers. Infact, it’s a positive benefit, with some of the highest densities of tigers in Tiger Reserves including Corbett, Bandipur, Nagarhole, Mudumalai, Ranthambhore and Bandhavgarh which also have very high numbers of visitors each year (see attached graph). Infact in the last NTCA Tiger census publicised in March this year, tiger numbers in all these parks went up – even as tourism numbers and land and grazing pressures have increased significantly since the 2006 Tiger census (see attached spreadsheet). At the same time, unseen and unloved sanctuaries and forest corridors lost their tigers and wildlife to poaching, grazing, agriculture and extractive industries.

Views of other experts on Wildlife Tourism & Conservation as follows:

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