So this was why they called it a tiger show. About 30m away, the star, “B3”, was challenging his father, “B2”, to a noisy fight by declaring, with urinal squirts and tree rubbings, this jungle territory as his own.

At the first sound of his resonating roar, our driver had taken off in its direction, joining a herd of 35 other 4x4s packed with Indian tourists, sari scarves trailing in the rush.

Yet the tigers, in the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve, which attracts 45,000 visitors a year, were unperturbed by the audience. B3 was so sure of his princely countenance that he even managed to part the traffic.

Why, then, has the Government decided to ban tourists from the heartlands of India’s 37 national tiger reserves? Yes, tiger numbers have plummeted to little more than 1,000, but tourists aren’t the problem.

A tiger encounter in India

You’ve waited a week in Corbett National Park to see a tiger, then three hungry ones come along. Steve Backshall legs it

At the last count, Bandhavgarh had 20 tigers within a small 100sq km tourism zone. That is four times the usual density.

Last year I set out on a three-month journey into India’s remaining forested lands to find out why, after so much worldwide attention and so many official protective measures, there was still such a problem conserving tigers.

I drove and walked through just about every patch of forest on the satellite map of Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Assam, three of India’s best-known tiger-range states, trampling through their protected areas, reserve forests and the so-called wildlife corridors. What I found was disheartening.

Instead of healthy biodiverse forests protected by 35 years of Indira Gandhi’s trumpeted Project Tiger, and a Government committed to saving tigers and their forests, I found denuded landscapes: overgrazed, chopped-down and burnt-out woodlands; countless plantations of teak trees; millions of cattle and goats; demotivated, under-resourced forest guards; new poaching camps; and the never-ending pressure of humankind.

I met a forest guard who refused to acknowledge a large tiger’s pawprint that I pointed out to him. Quietly, he admitted to me later that “where there are no tigers, then there are no problems”.

In a landscape where more than 850 million people survive on £1 a day, where environmental protection is at the bottom of a long list of government imperatives, where a forestry department runs wildlife parks, and where forest guards have an easier life when there are no tigers to worry about, the result is a one-way street for one of the world’s favourite animals.

But I believe that there is already a proven method of stopping the downward spiral, if only the tiger conservation fraternity and the Government would recognise it, stop blaming it and instead use it to encourage entrepreneurs.

“If it pays, it stays” is an old environmental maxim, and nature tourism does exactly this: people pay handsomely to see wildlife and pristine wilderness.

Tigers, like most other animals, don’t seem to mind the tourist vehicles. If they did, why do they appear to be doing so well in areas full of inquisitive and noisy visitors? Today, in tourism zones, what tigers used to do under cover of darkness, such as hunting and mating, they now seem secure enough to engage in during daylight hours, too.

What is needed is a greater vision for wildlife tourism. We need to see well- structured eco-tourism over more of India’s forest landscape. That tourism needs to benefit financially the people who live on and manage the land to encourage them to value and protect the tiger, and there need to be more public-private partnerships in India’s remaining forests.

Then we would see the tiger phoenix rise from the parched ashes of so many denuded and lifeless forests. It pays to keep tigers alive and where they belong.

Julian Matthews is the founder chairman of Travel Operators for Tigers, a campaign to promote responsible tourism practices in parks in India (www.toftigers.org)

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