Armed commandos to protect India's tigers

Armed commandos are to be deployed in the jungles of southern India to deter poachers from capturing and killing endangered tigers, state government officials announced on Wednesday. The 54-strong Special Tiger Protection Force will patrol the two main tiger reserves of Bandipur and Nagarhole national parks on the Karnataka-Tamil Nadu state border, the Karnataka government in Bangalore said. The squad, which includes forest rangers, has undergone a three-month course in jungle survival techniques as well as weapons training. "We plan to induct an additional 54 personnel into the force for deploying in the other three tiger reserves across the state," B.K. Singh, the state's principal chief conservator of forests, told reporters. "They will also undergo physical training, unarmed combat, training in using weapons, field engineering (and) map reading," he added, hailing the initiative as the first of its kind in India. India is home to half of the world's rapidly dwindling wild tiger population but has been struggling to halt the big cat's decline in the face of poachers, international smuggling networks and loss of habitat. From an estimated 40,000 animals in 1947, when India gained independence from British colonial rule, numbers were down to around 1,706 -- about half that in 2001 but slightly up on the 1,411 in 2006. Karnataka is India's most tiger-dense state, with some 300 of the predators prowling its six major reserves in 2010. The state forest department says that about 50 tigers have died in Karnataka since 2006, half of them killed by poachers, with the carcasses sold for use in traditional Chinese medicine. The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) has set aside 500 million rupees ($920,000) to raise, arm and deploy similar squadrons in 13 tiger reserves across India.