Keshav Verma, 69
Tiger conservator
Keshav Verma never thought his career would swing so drastically—from the civil services to urban planning to tiger conservation. After 30 years as a bureaucrat and World Bank official, the Gujarat cadre IAS officer of the 1976 batch took voluntary retirement to join the Bank’s global tiger recovery programme in 2008. He managed to bring 38 tiger habitat countries under the global campaign. Now, he is the programme director of the Global Tiger Initiative—a platform of governments, global agencies, civil society and the private sector to save the big cat.
He maintains that in the US, before tourists enter a park, there is an orientation session to educate them about wildlife. “Tourists in India, however, are only interested in tigers and will go to any extent to chase them. If they understand the value of the park in terms of its biodiversity, rivers and lakes, and other species, then this rush will vanish.”
Verma claims that the slow and persistent intrusion into core protected areas through local corruption, lack of regional planning and land grab are creating a slow burn crisis. “Many people living in Delhi, for instance, are trying to grab land around tiger reserves because they realise the increase in value, thanks to the rise in tiger tourism. They don’t consider the value or the integrity of habitat,” he explains.
Citing an example, he says, “You can have a landscape, say somewhere in India, like the Rajaji National Park in Uttarakhand, and right next to its core area is an industrial estate with power plants, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and petrochemicals.” A guarantee for mass destruction of the playground of the striped enigma.
Parks are increasingly being surrounded by development, which is slowly chocking their eco-system and destroying their integrity, fragmenting the tiger corridors, he rues.
“Large tracts of wilderness which are critical for the tiger’s survival have been lost in this manner. However, it’s not just the habitat which is being violated, the wilderness character of the parks are also being compromised,” says Verma.