Panna reserve ignored warnings

It took a team of wildlife experts to bring to light the fact that the tiger population in the Panna reserve in Madhya Pradesh had fallen drastically and was nowhere close to 24 tigers as was being claimed by the forest department, reports Chetan Chauhan. See graphics.

Updated on: Dec 20, 2008, 24:01:34 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

It took a team of wildlife experts to bring to light the fact that the tiger population in the Panna reserve in Madhya Pradesh had fallen drastically and was nowhere close to 24 tigers as was being claimed by the forest department.

In fact, a tiger expert had alerted the government three years ago, but wasn’t taken seriously.

On Friday, HT had reported that only one tiger was left in Panna and the National Tiger Conservation Authority had asked the government to airlift two tigresses from the Bandhavgarh reserve. The tigresses will be relocated by February, authority’s member secretary Rajesh Gopal said.

It was in October that a team from the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) sounded an alarm about the fall in tiger population. Until then, the forest department had been claiming that the reserve had 24 tigers. “But when confronted with scientific evidence that showed not a single tigress was left, they admitted to skewed sex ratio,” said a Dehradun-based WII scientist, who didn’t want to be named.

The goings-on in Panna seem like a replay of the events at Sariska, where the big cats vanished in 2004. In both the cases, the governments denied that the tiger population was under threat. Tiger expert Raghu Chandawat had alerted the forest department about the situation three years ago like conservationist Valmik Thapar had done for Sariska in Rajasthan. “When I told them that the tigers were are being killed, they accused me of lying. And, now we’ve only one tiger left,” Chandawat told HT.

This disdain probably explains why only 1,411 tigers (February figures) survive from over 40,000 at the beginning of the 20th century. Rampant killing and pressure of human population on tiger habitat brought the figure down to 2,000 in early 1960s.

Project Tiger was launched 13 years later and the figure improved to 3,500 in 1997, but as demand for tiger parts grew in China and southeast Asia, poachers shot down the population to 1,411. Since February, another 26 tigers had fallen prey, Wildlife Protection Society of India said.

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

Catch every big hit, every wicket with Crickit, a one stop destination for Live Scores, Match Stats, Infographics & much more. Explore now!

Stay updated with all top Cities including, Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai and more across India. Stay informed on the latest happenings in World News along with Delhi Election 2025 and Delhi Election Result 2025 Live, New Delhi Election Result Live, Kalkaji Election Result Live at Hindustan Times.