The year 2021 has not begun on a good note for the royal big cats with at least 16 of them, including three cubs, dying in the first month of January itself. On an average a striped cat succumbed to various reasons such as injuries, territorial fights, speeding vehicles, human-animal conflicts and poisoning every second day.
Maharashtra topped the list with the death of six big cats closely followed by Madhya Pradesh where five tigers died in the said period, as per data available from the Tigernet, an official database of the National Tiger Conservation Authority, a statutory body under the Union Environment Ministry.
At least ten big cats were found dead outside their protected habitat, suggesting that either they were poisoned or succumbed in man-animal conflict with the locals as they moved out in search of food probably after they were displaced from their terrains following a territorial fight with their counterparts.
But what was shocking was the four deaths in Maharashtra where in two separate incidents a tiger and a tigress with her three cubs were poisoned by the locals in Umred-Karhandla-Paoni Wildlife Sanctuary (UKPWS).
According to an official from the Ministry, one Divakar Dattuji Nagekar, Navegaon (Sadhu) village bordering the sanctuary was taken into custody. He is said to have admitted that he had poisoned the carcass of his cow when he found that his livestock was killed by the tigress. The feline was a resident of the sanctuary and was about 4-5 years old while the cubs were about 5 months old.
On January 27, a tiger was found dead under Bhadravati Forest Range of Chandrapur district in Maharashtra. A forest department staffer on patrolling duty detected the carcass of the feline at compartment no-210 under the range.
In the last two years, 40 tigers have died in the financial capital, Maharashtra, of the country.
Apart from Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, the States which lost tigers were Uttarakhand (2) while Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Kerala lost one each tiger in January itself.
In Uttarakhand, on January 16, the forest authorities of Haridwar forest division found the carcass of a tigress, around five-year-old, in the Shyampur forest range. The DFO of Haridwar, Neeraj Verma, ruled out any poaching attempt or any accident behind the death of the big cat and attributed it to anaemia. On January 6, yet another 12-year-old tigress was found dead at Fatehpur range of Haldwani forest division in Uttarakhand by a speeding SUV while in Bihar, a tiger’s carcass was found in the forest of Valmiki Tiger Reserve (VTR) in the State’s West Champaran district mid January.
Similarly, on January 28, a tiger who was around 18 was found dead in the core area of Madhya Pradesh’s Pench Tiger Reserve. “The carcass was recovered by the patrolling party, in the Gumtara Range of the tiger reserve,” its field director Vikram Singh Parihar said.
A senior official from the Ministry said that death of 16 tigers in a month is a matter of concern and calls for further strengthening the conservation measures, including community participation to protect the tigers.
Intriguingly, just when the tiger number has been showing increase in the country — home to nearly 3,000 predators and there is an urgent need to protect them, the fiscal’s allocation of Rs 350 crore for Project Tiger, an initiative for conserving the wildcat has been reduced to Rs 300 crore in the Budget 2021-22.
Also, the Budget for NTCA, responsible for tiger census and conservation of wild cats, saw a minor raise of Rs 50 lakh from Rs 10 crore last year to Rs 10.5 crore for 2021-22.
Union Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar, last year, after releasing the detailed Status of Tigers Co-predators and Prey in India 2018 had said, “Despite India’s constraint of 2.5 percent of global land, four per cent of rainfall and 16 per cent of world’s human population, India is home to eight per cent of world’s biodiversity which includes 70 per cent of world’s tiger population.”
Friday, 05 February 2021 | Archana Jyoti | New Delhi
