Nearly 6 years ago I vis­ited Jim Cor­bett National Park – my first national park ¹. Those of you who are famil­iar with Cor­bett NP know that the splen­dor of it’s Dhikala Range can­not be expressed in words.

As the Gypsy bumped around on the dirt road at 50 kmph, I bus­ied myself on the back seat, cran­ing my neck to see the top of trees – squint­ing my eyes as the tree tops burnt a bright yel­low where they met the sun high above. A cool Jan­u­ary breeze blew in my face, play­ing havoc with my shoul­der length hair. My eyes soaked in the green­ery, first tried, and even­tu­ally gave up the task of dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing one shade of green from another. The beauty of the for­est took my breath away and the sweet scented breeze encour­aged me to take deeper breaths. One half of me was begin­ning to wish the ride never ended while the other was wait­ing to see what more lay at the end of the road.

I go through a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence when­ever I visit a par­tic­u­lar for­est for the first time.

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Almost every­one I know has thrilling sto­ries to tell about their first encounter with a tiger. Either they were on foot, or it was late at night, or they were alone in the forest…there are as many true stores as there are truths. Unfor­tu­nately I do not have such a thrilling encounter to exchange with them.

The first time I saw a tiger in the wild was in Jim Cor­bett National Park. It was my first visit to the national park and I was on my way to the guest house in the Dhikala range.  About ninety min­utes into the drive I saw a black tail dash across the road. That’s it. That’s my first tiger expe­ri­ence. At 11.10 am, in the broad day­light of a win­ter morn­ing I saw a tiger tail jump the road. How did I know it was a tiger? Well, you see, when tigers are sur­prised and need to make a dash – they don’t make a dash, they ditch. So this female did not run off into the for­est, she hid in the thicket besides the road no more than 20 feet from us. We could not see her at that time, but we knew she was near by. We waited for 55 min­utes, before she slowly and slyly came out form her hid­ing place; took a good long look at us and walked away into the for­est. Vis­i­bly upset at being forced  to hide.

After that I did not see any tigers for the rest of my visit.

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Band­hav­garh Tiger Reserve is famous for its tigers. Peo­ple from all over the world come here to see and pho­to­graph the big cat. But Band­hav­garh ¹ is burst­ing at the seams – not with tigers but with Maruti Gyp­sies. A case of over­ex­po­sure at its worst. Dur­ing peak tourism sea­son, the jun­gle is as chaotic as a mela. It’s dis­turb­ing for the ani­mals and depress­ing for the trees. Last sea­son, the admin­is­tra­tion restricted the num­ber of cars enter­ing from each of the three gates. The thought behind the action was pri­mar­ily traf­fic con­trol – not for­est health. But all the expo­sure has its ben­e­fit – the national park or its tigers won’t be dis­ap­pear­ing any­time soon.

Abun­dant infor­ma­tion leads to abun­dant tourism, abun­dant tourism leads to abun­dant rev­enue, which leads to abun­dant tourism-related infra­struc­ture (guides, lit­er­a­ture, hotels, restau­rants, etc) which again leads to abun­dant tourism. Vicious circle.

On the other hand, Narara², a part of Marine National Park³, suf­fers in silence. It is one of the rare places in the world where you can see Corals with­out hav­ing to dive under­wa­ter. Dur­ing my last two vis­its there I saw not one. Muddy deposits have choked them to death. The muddy water is a result of con­struc­tion activ­i­ties car­ried out to lay pipes for a major oil com­pany. Did you know about this place? Then how will you know what is killing it?

Lack of infor­ma­tion leads to lack of tourism, lack of tourism leads to lack of rev­enue, which leads to lack of tourism-related infra­struc­ture (lit­er­a­ture, guides, hotels, restau­rants, etc) which again leads to lack of tourism. Vicious circle.

The onus of respon­si­ble tourism lies on us, the tourist. We should not only ensure that a place is not dam­aged by our vis­its, but, we should also ensure that a place does not die because we do not visit it.

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Our zoos are the first point of con­tact for man and ani­mal. National parks have three major dis­ad­van­tages – they are far from cities, they are expen­sive, and you don’t see all the ani­mals in one day. A zoo over­comes all these. There­fore, a zoo is extremely impor­tant in the life­cy­cle of nature education.

When a per­son is watch­ing an ani­mal in the cage, it is at that time, that he is most inter­ested in what he is see­ing. It is when this curios­ity is not sat­is­fied that he loses inter­est in the ani­mal and dis­misses it as a sense­less, use­less crea­ture. When he feels hand­i­capped by his igno­rance he decides to boost his self-esteem by teas­ing the ani­mal, throw­ing bot­tles or peb­bles at it or even, sense­lessly, feed­ing it. To avoid this it is extremely impor­tant that we inform vis­i­tors when they are in the recep­tive mode.

Zoos try to inform vis­i­tors. They have a vari­ety of illus­trated and bilin­gual dis­play pan­els. Good. But what the zoo for­gets is that the vis­i­tors are there to see the ani­mals, not to read texty infor­ma­tional pan­els. It would be a bet­ter solu­tion to have vol­un­teers to talk to our vis­i­tors, take them form cage to cage and give them a guided tour of the zoo. Much like what you could get at the Taj Mahal in Agra or the Red Fort in Delhi. If you can do it for national her­itage, you can do it for nat­ural her­itage. Don’t make the zoo into a visit, make it an experience.

The zoos in our coun­try are in a pathetic state, the cages are too small, the ani­mals are not com­fort­able, fac­tors con­cern­ing their health are not con­sid­ered, man­power and main­te­nance is severely lack­ing and many more prob­lems persist.

The Cen­tral Zoo Author­ity, an autonomous body reg­u­lat­ing the func­tion­ing of zoos, has laid down the stan­dards for hous­ing, upkeep, health care and over­all man­age­ment of zoos in the coun­try. Your recent zoo visit will be the judge of how upto-the-mark these stan­dards are.

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