India tigers fall to 1,411, half earlier estimate

File photo of a male tiger in Ranthambhore National Park. The number of tigers in India has plummeted to around 1,411, nearly half the previous estimate, as humans either kill them for their body parts or encroach on their habitat, according to a government survey.

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - The number of tigers in India has plummeted to around 1,411, nearly half the previous estimate, as humans either kill them for their body parts or encroach on their habitat, according to a government survey.

The estimate comes from the latest tiger census by the government-run National Tiger Conservation Authority, and is based on a more complex counting method.

The previous census, carried out in 2001 and 2002, said there were 3,642 tigers. A century ago there were 40,000.

"The tiger has suffered due to direct poaching, loss of quality habitat, and loss of its prey," Rajesh Gopal, a member of National Tiger Conservation Authority, said in a statement released late on Tuesday.

Conservationists say thousands of forest guard posts lie empty. Guards that do exist are badly paid and underarmed, giving them little incentive to tackle poachers. Tiger body parts are considered a potent ingredient in some folk medicines, especially in China.

It is unlikely that dwindling populations will ever recover, said Valmik Thapar, a conservationist and advisor to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on wildlife affairs.

Thapar blames this on "bad governance, a ridiculously brainless bureaucracy, a ministry of environment and forests that has malfunctioned for the last five years, and a prime minister who had honourable intentions but was badly advised by his own office."

In 2005, the government announced that there were no tigers left in Sariska Tiger Reserve, more than 30 years after it had set up Project Tiger, a national effort to protect the species.

Critics see this as an example of India's perennial difficulty in turning good intentions into ground reality.

But India says it is not giving up. The government recently said it will spend around 6 billion rupees over the next five years -- four times as much as the previous budget.

Some of that money will be spent on shifting villages and tribal communities away from tiger habitats. But the Recognition of Forest Rights Act, passed in 2006 to guarantee forest access to certain communities, has muddied this strategy.

The new survey's margin of error puts the number of tigers as low as 1,165 or as high as 1,657.

The survey did not include the Sundarbans, a vast marshy mangrove forest straddling the border with Bangladesh where tigers are still sometimes spotted, because the terrain requires a different counting methodology.