India, home to most of the world’s remaining wild tigers, and China, the largest consumer of tiger products mostly as traditional medicine, are busy finalizing a MoU to save the endangered big cat.

A seven-member delegation of Chinese forest officials was in New Delhi to discuss the draft MoU last week. Though there have been several exchange of notes, the two parties never met since 1995 when the then Environment Minister Kamal Nath signed a tiger protocol with his Chinese counterpart Song Jian at Beijing.

Waiting to be ratified by the foreign ministries of the respective countries, the MoU’s principal focus is on three areas:

• Vigilance across the borders: Improving the information network on trafficking and institutionalising a mechanism to curb smuggling of tiger parts.

• Capacity building: This includes proposals like training of Chinese staff at Dehradun’s Wildlife Institute of India. New Delhi has also agreed to have a pilot project on China’s claim of standardising release of captive-bred tigers in the wild something India scientists have always consider “unrealistic.”

• Segregation of farm and wild products: While China claims to have about 4000 tigers in its different farms and is likely to relax certain regulations against using tiger derivatives in their country, India is

w continued on page 2