New Delhi, July 16: Comparing tigers and Mangalyaan may seem bizarre but a new bio-economic analysis throws up interesting statistics — saving two big cats gives more value than the cost of India’s much-hyped maiden mission to Mars.
In a one-of-its-kind analysis, an Indo-Australian team of scientists has published a paper titled ‘Making the hidden visible: Economic valuation of tiger reserves in India’ in the journal Ecosystem Services.
It says saving two tigers yields a capital benefit of about `520 crore; in comparison ISRO’s maiden mission to mars Mangalyaan cost the country `450 crore. According to the last estimate, India is home to 2,226 adult tigers which would mean a capital benefit of about
` 5.7 lakh crore — almost equivalent to a third of the total currency that was demonetised by the government!
So conservationists say saving tigers makes good economic sense! This is when many of the ecosystem benefits accruing to the society by conserving natural habitats where tiger is the apex species simply cannot be assigned any monetary value. Even then, the benefits of saving tigers throw up a huge number.
The scientists looked at six tiger reserves and estimated that conserving them was equivalent of keeping a secure capital of USD 230 billion which they call ‘stock benefits’ of these tiger reserves. The 11-member team says estimating monetary values of ecosystem services from biodiversity can help in making conservation more appealing and benefits from biodiversity more visible to policy makers.
The team led by Professor Madhu Verma from the Indian Institute of Forest Management, Bhopal, says tiger reserves in India not only support more than half of the global tiger population and are cornerstones of biodiversity conservation, they also provide a wide range of economic, social and cultural benefits in the form of ecosystem services.
“Ignorance of such values influences public policies, including decisions involving investments and allocation of funding that may impact their protection status with serious implications on human wellbeing. Through economic valuation of ecosystem services from six tiger reserves in India, we demonstrate that enhanced investment in these tiger reserves is economically rational,” he says.
The team analysed the economic benefits accruing to the country from Corbett Tiger Reserve that is home to 215 tigers, Kanha Reserve (80 tigers), Kaziranga (106), Periyar Reserve (35), Ranthambore (46), and the Sunderbans Tiger Reserve (76). The tiger estimates are all from 2014 when the National Tiger Conservation Authority gave its last countrywide census figures.
A simple back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that each tiger has a flow benefit of about USD 2.19 million per year. This can be viewed as the interest one earns annually by conserving each tiger. Towards this, the total annual expenditure to maintain these six tiger reserves was just about `23 crore.
PTI
