Last January, when the Ministry of Environment and Forests began its Rs 13-crore tiger census—with the Supreme Court watching—it said that by this July, it would have the first “scientific” count. This evening, it issued a three-para press release: it will take at least one more year.

What the Ministry didn’t mention is that its entire tiger-counting process has been questioned by an international team of experts officially invited by the Government.

Under fire since The Sunday Express broke the missing tiger stories last year, the ministry top brass have been ducking the critical question of how many tigers have died. They are nowhere near the answer. (The last census counted 3,600 tigers, it is feared that the number now will be below 1500.)

Glaring holes in the method of counting, too much dependence on “integrity” of the surveyors, high possibility of tainted numbers—these are among the startling conclusions of a team led by John Seidensticker, one of the world’s most revered tiger experts who works with the department of conservation biology at Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park in Washington, DC.

After surveying the census operations in seven tiger reserves, including Corbett (Uttaranchal) and Valmiki (Bihar)—Valmiki is considered to be one of the worst-hit reserves—Seidensticker and his team have already filed their report. A copy of it has already reached the World Conservation Union which monitors conservation protocols across the world.

The key points made in the report, a copy of which is with The Indian Express:

• The Ministry dispensed with the “pugmark” counting method claiming it was prone to human error. And introduced what it called a “peer-reviewed, scientific” method under which counting involves several stages, use of cameras, testing of DNA samples and mapping tiger density using GIS (geographic information systems). Seidensticker’s report says that this method, too, relies on the “integrity of the primary data collectors, data compilers and their supervisors.”

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