India may be endangering its elusive Bengal tigers

But this is a real-life story unfolding today, as India’s government seeks to protect the country’s dwindling population of Bengal tigers while balancing the privileges of man.

India has nearly half the world’s estimated 3,500 tigers. But in a country where the human population has ballooned to more than 1.1 billion ? most of whom live on less than $2 a day ? the government is also focused on expanding the economy and reducing poverty.

India’s parliament recently passed a law that enshrines the right of forest dwellers to remain in the forests and could allow the return of hundreds of thousands of people who abandoned their claim to the forest decades ago.

Environmentalists fear that the new law ? known as the Forest Dwellers Rights Act, and due to come into force in the coming weeks ? throws open the gates of India’s national parks and reverses decades of progress in preserving the country’s shrinking forests and the tigers that inhabit them.

“The economy is the priority now and everything else can go to hell,” said Valmik Thapar, a conservationist.

Many Hindu believers worship tigers and protecting the animal has long been a national goal. In India’s northwestern state of Rajasthan, Ranthambhore National Park attracts tens of thousands of tourists every year eager to glimpse the elusive orange-and-black striped cats, the core of a growing tourism trade here that brings in more than $22 million a year.

But the potential strains created by the Forest Dwellers Act are plain to see here too.

About 200,000 villagers live just outside the national park, many of them former forest dwellers. They were coaxed out of the forest over the past 30 years with promises of schools, health clinics and electricity ? all part of a program to protect the tiger habitat.

“By now, most of us have forgotten how to live in the forest. We are farmers now, not hunters,” said Chittat Gurjer, 67, a slim man in a white turban.

The rights of India’s forest dwellers need to be protected, the act’s supporters say. Indian media reports that thousands of forest dwellers have been evicted and many forest communities violently harassed in recent weeks, which some analysts say is an effort to limit the number of people eligible to initiate land claims under the act.

Environmentalists and wildlife experts are lobbying parliament and the courts to strike down the law, widely seen as a populist vote-getter in the lead-up to next year’s elections.

“This is legislation that no one in parliament can say no to. It’s part of India’s romanticized notion of forest dwellers as people who live in harmony with the land,” said Goverdhan Singh Rathore, whose non-governmental agency, the Prakratik Society, provides schooling and medical care for many of the villagers who were once forest dwellers.

Luxury hotels and “eco-lodges” have sprouted on the edges of Ranthambhore National Park. Tourists pile into open-roofed jeeps and 20-seater buses that rumble along dirt roads through nearly 300 square miles of forest, passing langur monkeys, elk-size deer called sambars and monitor lizards that dart back into the brush as the cars pass.

But here, as throughout India, the chances of seeing a tiger are getting slimmer.

At least four of India’s 27 tiger reserves no longer have tigers. Some observers believe that at least nine other reserves in India also are in danger of losing their remaining tigers to poachers or to villagers who set out poisoned carcasses to kill animals that venture beyond the boundaries of the reserves to attack their livestock.