In the autumn of 2007, Barbara Webb travelled to India with Discovery Initiatives to see some of the world's remaining wild tiger population. Barbara is also active with Kathmandu Animal Treatment Centre in Nepal. She resides in England.

Hello friends at Little Lotus Hearts. My partner and I visited India in March this year. We were there with a travel company, Discovery Initiatives, which specialises in taking small groups of interested people to examine conservation work in more depth than is possible when you’re simply passing through. We were scheduled to visit three National Parks, all in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.

The first was Panna, a 544 square kilometre “Project Tiger” reserve. Project Tiger was set up in 1973 to preserve India’s remaining wild tigers, of which there were estimated to be around 1,800. Unfortunately outcomes have been mixed, and independent naturalists currently estimate the wild tiger population to be less than 1,000.

We drove around the park, morning and evening, for four days, until on the last day the news circulated that a tiger had been sighted by the elephant patrols and could be viewed! This involved travelling to the site by jeep, then transferring to elephant back to move across country to get to within 4 or 5 metres of a male tiger. He appeared unfazed by the 2 or 3 elephants surrounding him and had recently killed a sloth bear. After about 5 minutes we withdrew to make way for the next group. The tigers are “held” by the elephant “show” for up to an hour, provided that the reserve authorities determine that they will not be unduly stressed.

The tiger shows bring great financial benefits to the parks and provide the only way to get reliably close to the animals. However, elephants are not indigenous to these areas and can cause swaths of damage to the vegetation if allowed to roam.

It appears that there is only one tiger left in Panna, and he has no mate. All the other tigers of Panna have been poached.

Next, we drove approximately 200 miles to reach Bandhavgarh National Park, a small area of 105 sq kilometres, with a buffer zone of around 400 sq km. The land between the parks had become mainly scrubby desert, interspersed with small towns and villages farming grains. The lodge owner in Panna, a naturalist and ecologist, dreams of creating a corridor to link Panna and Bandhavgarh.

In Bandhavgarh we saw several tigers, all from the Jeep, including a mother with three cubs. It is a small area, well protected and well visited to the point of being uncomfortably crowded.

Our final National Park was Kanha, a further 200 miles across Madhya Pradesh, through terrain that had become degraded and shorn of wildlife. This is a much bigger park at 1,945 sq km. There are variations in the landscape and a feeling of space. Again in Kanha, anti-poaching protection had been effective and the tiger population was buoyant. We had three sightings, the final one as part of a tiger show. On this occasion it was a female, replete and rather sleepy, and uninterested in the tourists.

We absorbed a great variety of information about both the tigers and the other wildlife from our accompanying naturalist. Tigers are the top of the hierarchy, but we also saw many varieties of deer, wild boar, turtles, mongoose and a vast array of birds.

Inevitably, we asked what we as individuals could do to help retain the few tigers that are left. We were told that simply by visiting, as part of an ecologically aware group, we were helping.

Discovery Initiatives is a founder member of TOFT, Travel Operators for Tigers, which aims to support a sustainable tiger tourist industry. Travelling with a TOFT member when you go to India will ensure that you are bringing benefits to what you are seeing.

Global Tiger Patrol has been set up to protect habitat, integrate local people into projects, help anti-poaching, and collect accurate field data. Supporting this, or organisations like it, will assist in protecting the remnants of the tiger population, and then, possibly, bringing them back from the brink on which they now hover.