Tiger Tourism in India Banned

India's top court has band tourists from certain areas of its tiger parks in an effort to boost the threatened population of tigers.

According to the World Wildlife Federation (WWF), although there are no accurate estimates of the world's tiger population, numbers are estimated to have fallen by over 95 percent since the turn of the 20^th century. Currently at its lowest level with possibly as few as 3,200 in the world, Bali, Javan and Caspian tigers were extinct by the 1980s and there may be as few as 1,400 tigers left in India, which is home to about half of the world's populations of tigers. This is down from around 100,000 at the turn of the last century.

In parks such as the Ranthambhore National Park, tigers draw thousands of tourists and businesses. The court says that the ban is temporary, with a final judgement on a case filed by a wildlife activist, Ajay Dube, asking that commercial activities be banned from core areas of the tiger reserve. He said to the court that important tiger habitats need to be kept safe from human disturbances, including tourism.

In April, the court had ordered buffer zones to be declared in tiger reserves for eight states, within three months. Only two of the eight have compiled, which has resulted in the court imposing fines on the six that haven't.

The ban have caused some travel and tourism operators to protest, saying that stopping tourism to the area will encourage illegal wildlife trafficking and poachers will no longer be hindered by tourist's presence. "The highest densities of tigers can be found today in the most heavily visited tiger reserves," said a statement from the group, Travel Operators for Tigers which believes tigers are safer when there are large numbers of tourists.

The number of visitors to India's tiger parks has increased in recent years with domestic tourism at a high.

A few facts about Tigers

Tigers are found throughout areas of the world including Asia and the Russian Far East. Less than a century ago, tigers lived throughout almost all of Asia but many of those species are now extinct. Today, their population has been reduced to just 7 percent of its former size and they are now only found in 13 range states: