New Delhi, Sept. 2: International acclaim has always come faster than domestic acceptance for wildlife biologist Ullas Karanth, who spent two decades struggling to convince India’s wildlife managers that their method of counting tigers was flawed.

Karanth — a mechanical engineer retrained as a biologist — will receive the 2007 J. Paul Getty Award for conservation leadership and scientific innovation, including a new way to assess the abundance of wildlife which Indian officials rejected for years.

The World Wildlife Fund award recognises Karanth’s work on strategies for species and habitat conservation, his contribution to elephant and tiger conservation, and his focus on perfecting methods to monitor wildlife abundance, a top WWF official said. The $200,000 (Rs 82 lakh) award will go towards establishing a fellowship programme to support graduate students in the field of conservation at a university of Karanth’s choice.

It comes at a time when Karanth believes India’s forest and wildlife managers are veering towards some of his ideas. “It’s been a long wait — over 20 years — but there is now movement in the right direction,” Karanth said.

For nearly two decades, while government surveys showed a sharp rise in tiger population, Karanth showed that the numbers were misleading. The problem lay in the counting method, which was aimed at a census of tigers in their habitats. Karanth urged officials to abandon the census method and use statistics-based sampling technique for reliable assessments.

“It’s impossible to do a tiger census — it’s too large an area. It was obvious that the census wasn’t working. But it’s only after the Sariska debacle that things changed,” Karanth told The Telegraph .

Two years ago, wildlife officials were jolted by the discovery that Rajasthan’s Sariska Tiger Reserve — where the previous census of 2001 had indicated the presence of 24 to 26 tigers — did not have a single tiger.

While his sampling method remained largely ignored by officials in India, it was applied to assess tiger populations in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, jaguars in Brazil and other South American countries, and cheetahs in Iran.

“His biggest contributions have been bringing science into conservation decision-making and highlighting the need to create inviolate spaces for wildlife,” said M. D. Madhusudan with the Nature Conservation Foundation, Mysore.

Karanth’s work has also helped to reduce habitat fragmentation in the Bhadra Tiger Reserve in Karnataka through voluntary resettlement of 16 villages and resolve a human-wildlife conflict in Nagerhole National Park.

But some conservation experts say there is still debate whether his innovative voluntary resettlement strategies, which benefited both people and wildlife, are indeed replicable elsewhere in the country or were only site-specific solutions.

Scientists suspect the delay by Indian wildlife officials to accept his sampling suggestions stemmed from a combination of factors. “Perhaps he was seen as maverick — an engineer who took up biology, or perhaps the method of science had not quite entered the circles of conservation bureaucracy,” said one conservation expert.

Karanth, who is in Bhutan today, said: “These methods were new to the country.”

He believes there is still hope for India’s tigers. “They do well when their areas are kept free from incompatible human activities,” he said. In other words, no hunting of prey species and no large-scale collection of forest produce in tiger zones.