NTCA changes stripes, now cites lockdown for tiger report delay

Nagpur: Even after a delay of 10 months, the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), a statutory body under MoEFCC (ministry of environment, forest and climate change) monitoring all tiger reserves in the country, has failed to release final All-India Tiger Estimation (AITE) 2018 report.
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi released ‘Status of tiger in India-2018’ report on July 28, 2019 (World Tiger Day), NTCA-WII had promised to release the final report in a month with figures of individual tiger reserves and clusters.
“If the NTCA-WII did not have figures of individual tiger reserves, then how did it arrive at the figure of 2,967 tigers in the country as per AITE-2018, an increase by 33% from 2,226 tigers in 2014,” say wildlife experts and independent scientists.
On December 17, TOI reported how doubts were being raised over the increase in number of tigers and time was being taken to revamp the report to substantiate its own figures.
The NTCA conducts tiger estimation every four years. In 2014, the preliminary (summary) report was released on January 20, 2015, and final report was quietly released in March.
To make a mention, in Maharashtra, the Phase IV tiger estimation exercise, similar on the lines of NTCA, is in final stages. Tadoba has already released its 2019 report on ‘Long-term monitoring of prey and predators’ recently with an estimated 115 tigers and 151 leopards in 1,700 sqkm area.
In December, when TOI sought to know from NTCA member-secretary Anup Kumar Nayak about the delay, he said, “The report needs to be compiled properly and is in final stages. It will be released by December 31, the deadline to release the report.”
In January 2020, when TOI inquired about it, Nayak said the final report was in print. Three days ago, when TOI again asked him, Nayak said, “The report is in print, but held up due to lockdown.”
A similar reply was received from YV Jhala, principal investigator & WII scientist. Contrarily, lockdown came into force after March 24 and had it been in print in January, the report would have been out by now.
Arjun Gopalaswamy, science adviser, Global Programs, Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), who had critically analysed NTCA reports, says, “Our study looked more closely at the scientific bases and implications of India’s claims of rising tiger numbers over the past 12 years as per the NTCA-WII reports.”
“We found claims of an ‘inverted occupancy-abundance relationship’. This is very unusual in ecology. We also found that the methods adopted generate estimates of tiger numbers with a much higher variability (noise) than previously thought, and consequently, undermining the claims of ‘doubling of tiger numbers’ over the past 12 years,” Gopalaswamy told TOI.
He said, “Our study recommends a thorough re-analysis of all past tiger data to account for these variabilities, and in the future, to focus on using methods to estimate accurately tiger occupancy at the national, regional levels and methods to estimate accurately tiger abundance at individual sites or reserves.”
However, one of the major reasons for going slow on the report is due to errors creeping in the 2018 summary report. WII, in September last, reacting to news reports appearing in a section of media on exaggerated numbers, had admitted that original 2014 tiger photo album had a few errors that were due to typos and pasting of the same photos in multiple places.
“These errors had crept in during copy-editing by the printer and have now been rectified in the uploaded corrigendum album for all camera trap photos obtained by the forest department of states and WII,” it stated. Hence, WII is now more careful before coming out with the final report.
NTCA officials maintained the delay is due to three times more data collected than 2014. In 2018 estimation, 3.5 crore wild animal images were recorded which need finer detailing. The delay is purely due to voluminous work.
Tigers 2014 | 2018
Maharashtra 190 | 312
Uttarakhand 340 | 442
Uttar Pradesh 117 | 173
Madhya Pradesh 308 | 526
Karnataka 406 | 524
Kerala 136 | 190
Tamil Nadu 229 | 264