CHHITAR GURJER is one of thousands of forest dwellers lured out of Ranthambhore National Park in India's northwestern state of Rajasthan over the past 30 years with promises of schools, health clinics and electricity - all part of a government-backed programme to protect the country's dwindling population of tigers.

"By now, most of us have forgotten how to live in the forest. We are farmers now, not hunters," said Gurjer, 67, a slim man in a white turban with deep creases cut around his eyes by the sun.

India's parliament recently passed a law that enshrines the right of forest dwellers to remain in the forests and could allow the return of people such as Gurjer, who abandoned their claim to the forest decades ago.

But conservationists fear that the new law - known as the Forest Dwellers Rights Act, and due to come into force in the coming weeks - throws open the gates of India's national parks to potentially hundreds of thousands of people, reversing more than 30 years of progress in preserving the country's shrinking forests and the tigers that live in them.

India has nearly half the estimated 3500 tigers worldwide, but in a country where the human population has ballooned to more than 1.1 billion - most of whom who live on less than $2 a day - the government seems more concerned with expanding the economy and reducing poverty than protecting tigers, its national animal often fetishised by Hindu mythology.

"The economy is the priority now and everything else can go to hell," said Valmik Thapar, a conservationist and author who for more than a decade has publicised the plight of India's tigers. "India's tigers are disappearing. They are being killed mainly by poachers for their skin and bones, but there is no public outcry and no-one in the government who is committed to saving them."

Ranthambhore National Park attracts tens of thousands of tourists every year eager to glimpse a tiger, the core of a growing tourism trade here that brings in more than $22 million a year, including at least $300,000 in park entry fees.

Luxury hotels and "eco-lodges" have sprouted on the edges of the park. Tourists pile into open-roofed jeeps and 20-seater buses that rumble along dirt roads through nearly 400sqkm of forest, passing spotted deer, monkeys, gazelles and the ruins of a 16th century Mughal fort as trained guides search for the elusive cats.

But here, as throughout India, the chances of seeing a tiger are getting slimmer. Poaching has left only about 34 tigers in the park - nobody knows the exact number. In 2005, poachers confessed to killing 22 of the park's tigers, prompting fresh allegations of incompetence and corruption against forest guards and government officials.

As more and more of India's forests are logged or turned into farms to feed its ever-expanding population, the number of tigers has plummeted from an estimated 40,000 in 1925 to fewer than 1500 today, a figure that some experts say is the tipping point for extinction.

At least four of India's 27 tiger reserves no longer have tigers, and some observers believe that at least nine other reserves in India also are in danger of losing their remaining tigers to poachers or to villagers who set out poisoned carcasses to kill animals that venture beyond the boundaries of the reserves to attack their livestock.

Environmentalists and wildlife experts are lobbying India's parliament and the courts to oppose the Forest Dwellers Rights Act, widely seen as a populist vote-getter in the lead-up to next year's elections.

"This is legislation that no-one in parliament can say no to. It's part of India's romanticised notion of forest dwellers as people who live in harmony with the land," said Dr Goverdhan Singh Rathore, whose non-governmental agency, the Prakratik Society, provides schooling and healthcare for many of the 200,000 villagers living just outside the national park, many of them former forest dwellers.

"That might have been true in the past, but the reality now is that if the growing numbers of forest dwellers are allowed to remain in the national parks and others with historic claims to the land are allowed back in, India's forests will be gone very soon and with them the tigers," said Rathore, who is the son of Fateh Singh Rathore, one of the most renowned experts on India's tigers and a former forest warden at Ranthambhore National Park.

Kastori Gurjar, 78, has no intention of returning to the forest in Ranthambhore where she grew up and raised her only son. "We wouldn't go back there to live," she said, her eyes beginning to tear up.

"We just want to be allowed back in to worship our gods, who stayed in the forest."