Interview with Ulhas Karanth

[Guest guest]

The Telegraph

Sunday , February 24 , 2008

'I was interested in saving the tiger. So I created enemies'

Wildlife scientist K. Ullas Karanth called the government-used pugmark

system of counting tigers unscientific for years — and was often derided. He

is now being hailed. *Varuna Verma* meets India's true tiger man Tête à

tête

 

K. Ullas Karanth could easily have broken into an " I-told-you-so " speech.

And no one would have called the wildlife scientist smug. Twenty five years

ago, Karanth presented a paper at a wildlife conference in Kerala that

called the government-used pugmark system of counting tigers unscientific

and incorrect. " The bureaucrats were very upset with the paper and it was

promptly buried, " recalls Karanth, senior conservation scientist at the New

York-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and director, WCS India

Program, Bangalore.

 

But that didn't deter the tiger expert. " I have been telling the forest

department to opt for a sampling system to count tigers. But I always met

with bureaucratic red tape, " says Karanth.

 

Until the Sariska fiasco happened five years ago. " The farce blew up in the

face of the government, when its claim of 26 tigers in the forest reserve

was found completely false. There were no tigers left in Sariska, " says

Karanth.

 

The public relations disaster forced the government to give up the pugmark

system of counting the big cat and opt for Karanth's method.

 

For the first time — 35 years after Project Tiger was set up — it initiated

a scientific system to gauge the number of tigers. His method revised the

figures of India's tiger population to 1,411 — less than half of what was

shown in the last census.

 

And Karanth finds that he is suddenly in the news. The man who cried himself

hoarse for years — and was often derided as somebody who had nothing to do

with the wildlife establishment — is being hailed by the same system that

refused to take him seriously. There are, of course, some who are still

sceptical. Government conservationists in Bengal and Orissa are among those

who have questioned his figures. To most others, however, Karanth is king.

 

He may stand vindicated, but he doesn't thump his back. Instead, the

sober-looking, salt-and-pepper haired wildlife scientist — who won the J.

Paul Getty Award for Conservation Leadership last year — prefers to think

beyond numbers. " Whatever the numbers, the main issue is that despite good

habitats in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, tigers are getting

wiped out, " he says.

 

Karanth is working on his laptop in a quiet conference room at Bangalore's

WCS office. Once in a while, his Blackberry phone rings softly and he

excuses himself to take the call. He may have the technological comforts of

urban life, but he says he feels out of place in the city. " I go to the

jungles for one week every month to recharge my batteries, " he says.

 

He spent a lot more days in the wild during his salad days — much to his

speech pathologist wife's chagrin. He had made Nagarhole, a wildlife

sanctuary in Karnataka, his second home. " I would go home to Mysore only on

weekends, " he says. The rest of the time, he fought for the cause of the big

cat. He filed complaints against cattle grazing and poaching in the forests

and even got a road that ran through Nagarhole closed.

 

Life would have been smooth for Karanth had he been a regular scientist —

who conducted research and left it on paper. But the 60-year-old

conservationist — who has written 60 research papers and four books on the

big cat — went a step ahead. " I was interested in changing ground reality to

save the tiger and its habitat. So I created enemies, " he says.

 

Karanth was the first wildlife scientist in India to do radio tracking of

tigers. One tiger in Nagarhole died six months after it was tranquilised and

made to wear a collar. " This sparked a rumour that the collars were killing

the tigers, " remembers Karanth. The issue was blown up. A question was

raised in the Karnataka Assembly, Karanth's research was shut down and he

was accused of exporting tiger skin.

 

" The high court finally absolved me of all charges, " he says.

 

A year later, a poacher was found dead in the jungles of Nagarhole.

 

Again, Karanth's name came up in the list of suspects. " My car, laboratory

and 20 sq. km of forests were burnt by a local mob, " recalls the scientist.

 

A less passionate tiger lover would have given up. But Karanth was ready to

fight for the carnivore that had fascinated him since his teenage days. " I

often felt depressed but I didn't give up my work, " he says. He stuck on,

and went on to propagate a system of sampling — using cameras to track

tigers in a certain area and then using statistical techniques to estimate

their numbers. But it took him 25 years to get the government to listen.

 

The fact that the pugmark system of counting tigers survived for 40 years in

India shows there is no culture of science in the bureaucracy, says Karanth.

The system prescribes counting each tiger by its tracks. " Scientifically,

you can't do such a census, " says the scientist.

 

He would know. As a child, Karanth — the son of Kannada writer K. Shivarama

Karanth — grew up in the lap of wildlife, in Pittur, a small west Karnataka

town located on the fringes of the Western Ghats. " I would wander alone into

the forests looking for wildlife, " he says.

 

And almost always, the animal lover came away depressed. " Hunting was

rampant. People would parade the leopards, tigers and wild boars they

killed, " says Karanth.

 

Back then, Karanth couldn't turn his passion for wildlife into his

profession. " There was no career in wildlife. All middle class boys either

became doctors or engineers, " he says. Karanth reluctantly picked

engineering. But even during his college days — at the National Institute of

Technology, Suratkal — the call of the wild continued to lure. " I would bunk

classes and take off to the Nagarhole, Bhadra and Kudremukh sanctuaries on

my motorcycle, " he says.

 

When Karanth began working in Bangalore — as an engineer at Mico — he soon

found that city life didn't suit him. " Working in the city didn't give me an

opportunity to participate in wildlife conservation, " says Karanth. So he

quit his job, bought land north of Nagarhole and started farming.

 

For the next decade, farming kept Karanth close to nature. It also changed

his romantic, urban notions that rural people share a symbiotic relation

with the forests. " Cattle grazing, hunting and wood cutting were ruining the

forests, " he says.

 

Karanth became an amateur conservationist and began fighting for the right

to protect forest cover. " There's just three per cent of forest cover left

in India. Encroaching into it is not going to solve the country's problem of

accommodating its population, " he says.

 

From amateur, Karanth turned into a professional wildlife scientist after

obtaining a masters degree in wildlife ecology from the University of

Florida in 1988. The same year, he joined the WCS's India chapter. With 20

years of research on the big cat, Karanth has conducted the longest running

tiger project in the world. His work has revolved around the Nagarhole,

Bandipur and Bhadra wildlife sanctuaries, where, Karanth says, the tiger

population has been bouncing back in the last five years. " When I was

growing up, the tiger had almost vanished from these parts, " says Karanth.

 

With the latest tiger census throwing up bleak figures, wildlife experts are

writing obituaries for the Indian big cat. But Karanth feels there's no need

to panic. " Tigers will remain in the 23rd century if the right work is

done, " he says. The carnivore can be saved, says Karanth, if issues such as

disappearing prey species, tiger hunting, conflict with man and unplanned

industrial growth are addressed head on.

 

Karanth plans to turn his Nagarhole tiger project — where rehabilitating the

population, protecting the forest cover and strictly cracking down on

poaching helped in saving the tiger — into a model which can be replicated

in other habitats.

 

People living in the Nagarhole reserve are currently being rehabilitated and

the tiger expert — who advised author R.K. Narayan when he was writing *The

Tiger of Malgudi* — is preparing to make another trip to his favourite

forests. " My job and hobby are the same. My wife complains there is no

difference between my weekdays and weekends, " says Karanth.

 

Not that the tiger is complaining.