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 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."
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.
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.
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.
They are different species, of different sizes, with different diets, with different behaviors. Comparing wolves and tigers is not really sensible.
But that doesn't stop people from killing wolves anyway.
Maybe there is some way to repel the animals inexpensively and without killing them.
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.).
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.
See: http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/10488
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.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_attacks_in_the_Sundarbans