The present ‘omrah’ (for the interested reader, the collective name for the courtiers who surrounded the sultans of medieval Delhi) seem to be the only people blissfully unaware of the ‘market’ for murdered tigers. Our prime minister and the UPA president have visited China in recent times. They can leverage the friendships they have built with Chinese leaders to intervene on behalf of the unfortunate tiger. Will they? Surely whatever their other predilections, the Chinese leadership cannot be serious supporters of the racket that passes for ‘trade’ in the limbs of the tiger. And in the year of the Beijing Olympics, they are seriously concerned about international opprobrium in matters like these. Our silence will ironically let them off the hook.

If you have visited any of our forests recently, you might, if you are lucky, bump into a forest guard. As part of budgetary austerities, state governments have stopped recruiting forest guards for many years now. The idea seems to be that as the existing ones retire, the species of forest guards can go extinct simultaneously with the tiger that they are supposed to protect. If you do happen to meet a forest guard, he is likely to be wearing torn chappals as the budget for shoes has not been approved, and he is likely to be carrying an antique rifle that became obsolete many decades ago.

The poachers have no budgetary constraints of a similar nature. They have SUVs, night-vision goggles, AK-47s and cell phones. Millions of poor Indians find the budgetary space to buy cell phones with prepaid cards, but our bloated environment ministries are loath to provide forest guards with the same. We have budgets for imported bullet-proof Mercedes cars for our VVIPs; we have budgets for hundreds of safari-suit-clad security personnel for our leaders; we have budgets for changing the names of cities as a substitute for improving them; we have budgets for bloated meaningless committees where we can park our inconvenient cronies; we have budgets for florid press advertisements from various comic ministries lying blissfully as they make claims to non-existent achievements. We have created a BSF, an RPF, a CRPF, an ITBF and a CISF — but when it comes to creating a Forest Protection Force, suddenly our fiscal constraints surface.

... contd.