Kawal is tiger reserve no. 42

The government has declared an important wildlife corridor for tigers between Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra as the 42nd tiger reserve in India. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Jun 21, 2011, 02:00:20 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The government has declared an important wildlife corridor for tigers between Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra as the 42nd tiger reserve in India. With this, the government has provided another exclusive zone for the big cats.

India’s tiger population has increased from 1,411 in 2006 to 1,706 in 2010 but their habitat area shrunk by about 22%.

In the last two years, the environment ministry added about 13 new tiger reserves ensuring their better protection. Each tiger reserve has a core area where no development activity is allowed and the buffer zone also has restrictions on the developmental works.

The latest addition in the list of protected areas for tiger is the 893 sq km Kawal wildlife sanctuary in Adilabad district of Andhra Pradesh, adjacent to Chandrapur district of Maharashtra.

“Apart from being a tiger habitat, it is an important west-south tiger corridor… its protection is required for providing space to the tiger movement,” environment minister Jairam Ramesh said.

The tiger census report in March, 2011, had citied huge degradation of forest corridors between tiger reserves as a major hindrance for increase in tiger population.

By declaring Kawal a wildlife area, the government expects an increase in number of tigers, especially in central Indian landscape for tigers. The sanctuary has about 20 tigers as per unofficial count.

A decision to declare Kanwal as tiger reserve was taken on June 15 after examining a proposal from the state government.

South India, which is turning out to be a hub for new tiger habitats, recently got another two new tiger reserves —Kudremukh and BR Temple Hills, both in Karnataka. One of the best maintained tiger reserves in India is Bandipur in Karnataka.

Another forest area, Satyamanglam in Tamil Nadu, once a hub of sandalwood smuggler Veerappan, is also in the pipeline to get approval. “Once we receive a proposal from the Tamil Nadu government on core and buffer areas, the decision will be taken,” Ramesh said.

The government expects to increase the number of tiger reserves to 46 by end of 2011 by declaring Nagzira-Navegaon and Bor wildlife areas in Maharashtra and Suhelwa in Uttar Pradesh.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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