Great news unless you are living in a village near the tigers. These are not animals I would want living near me. There are an estimated 270 tigers in Sunderbans National Park. They kill 100-250 people a year.
I have watched a few documentaries on this topic. I know it sends you spine chills even thinking about it, but many of the attacks are because the men go and gather honey and fish in the Tiger territory because they have almost exhausted them on their side.
I wonder many a times, we simply cannot co-exist to create an ecological balance with anything.
To quote Agent Smith in the movie Matrix:
"It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet."
> Great news unless you are living in a village near the tigers.
This fear that people have of nearby predators is, in fact, a real problem with conservation efforts to preserve those predators. David Quammen addresses this aspect of conservation in his book "Monster of God". He believes the fear of predators is more deep-seated in our psyche than most other fears.
I suspect your 100-250 number is high (perhaps way high?) but it only takes one in a village where everyone knows everyone to ratchet-up fear. If a neighbor kid were taken by a bear, I'd sure want the authorities to do something about that bear.
Just trying to figure out the circumstances where a bear could "take a child" that don't involve some serious negligence on whoever is supposed to be responsible for the kid. I grew up in a part of the US that is rife with bears and spent my childhood running around in wild areas with coyotes and rattlesnakes and never had any sorts of issues.
That's an unpopular opinion of course, but it's important to understand the attitude of the people living around them. The Outside Online article linked by avemuri elsewhere in this thread gets into the issue. Wildlife conservation is important, but I can't help but empathize with the people living in the surrounding area. With very little work and very little money to go around, and with tigers killing their livestock and rhinos getting into their crops, what are they supposed to do? It doesn't even have to happen often for it to become quite a contentious issue.
A simple way is to just pay the farmers for the damage.
For example, the group Defenders of Wildlife was faced with a similar situation in Montana, where the wolves were getting shot because they ate the livestock of the area. They raised money and paid for the losses in exchange of the promise that the ranchers wouldn't kill the wolves.
This doesn't help if people are attacked, of course.
Wolf damage to sheep herds in France is also paid for. There is still opposition to the wolf presence but I guess not being threatened with bankruptcy helps smooth some edges.
Also wolves help control the wild boar population, and those can be quite damaging for crops, so the economic impact of the wolf may actually be positive.
Eventually, someone is bound to be attacked thought, it will be interesting to see how policy is influenced when it happens. I can see how tigers can be a lot more polarizing.
That would probably work well, but only if the park has money. In the Outside Online article, a group of poachers were convinced to stop with the promise that they wouldn't be prosecuted and that they would get help to support themselves, but they are struggling to make good on that promise because they just don't have the funds.
Maybe there is some way to repel the animals inexpensively and without killing them.
Questions of conservation vs livelihoods are incredibly complex, not least in the Sundarbans area (have worked with farmers in this region) - complex in a way you don't see with human-animal conflict in other parts of the world. We are not talking about a few hundred french farmers and wolves here, but rather livelihood of hundreds of thousands.
It is probably one of the most densely populated areas lying so close to a tiger reserve. The population around the reserve are some of the most climate stressed farmers in the world (facing soil salinity and monsoon variability due to climate change) and areas inside the forest reserve have traditionally been an important source for additional livelihood (honey collection, fishing, etc.).
Farmers settled in these areas were also in part displaced during the colonial era from Bihar and other parts of West Bengal, in essence forced to live in the delta - now of course these are their villages and home towns.
To add to the challenge there is an incredible scarcity of food sources for tigers in the Sundarban reserve, with few other large animals, which is put forward as part of the reason they have (unlike tigers elsewhere) have made it a practice to treat humans as food sources. They are adept swimmers and do attack people in boats meaning that even fishing can be a risky endeavour for farmers.
All in all, the conflict between people and the tigers living in Sundarban is pretty complex and in no small part caused by people outside of the delta (including the British, the increased urban population of Kolkata and surrounding districts, etc.).
You wont live in a village close to them, as Indian government dislodged the Adivasi of Baiga and Gond tribes, who traditionally lived in the area, that is now a wild life reservation in Kanha, Similipal and Odisha Gondwana.
Those people got some pennies for the eviction, barely enough to buy a few days food in big city, but nowhere enough to buy land to live on.
I can really understand that those people join the Naxalite Maoist Army to fight Indian government to get their country back from investors, tourist and other western parasites.
"Listen lads, there's only a few of us, and 7 billion of them. They could stand to lose a few of their numbers. What say we help ourselves to a smooth-ape buffet lunch?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundarbans#Fauna