Rich haul of tiger body parts in Nepal shows increased threat to Indian tigers

Poachers killing tigers for money are back with vengeance with seizure of at-least seven tiger skins and over 160 kilogram of tiger bones in the Tibet-Nepal border hinting at revival of the popular smuggling route into China. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Feb 18, 2013, 14:24:24 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

Poachers killing tigers for money are back with vengeance with seizure of at-least seven tiger skins and over 160 kilogram of tiger bones in the Tibet-Nepal border hinting at revival of the popular smuggling route into China.

Three major tiger and leopard body part hauls in different districts of Nepal in the month of January has triggered panic among the wildlifers who claim that the recent seizures show that the magnitude of tiger killing in India is much more than reflected in the government's official records.

The government has claimed that around 80 tigers were killed in India including for poaching in 2012 whereas the seizures of tiger body parts in the year was much higher.

The biggest hauls of recent times came on January 12 when on 12 Nepal police seized five tiger skins and about 114 kilograms of tiger bones in bags in Nawakot district very close to Tibet border. The body parts were to be smuggled into Tiger in a van for the underground Chinese big cat medicine industry and two persons were arrested in this connection. The tiger skins and plastic bags containing bones were hidden under rice sacks in the van.

A day earlier, in Gorkha district about 160 km west from capital city of Kathmandu, Nepal police arrested some Tibetans with two tiger skins and 53 kilograms of tiger bones. They were arrested while they were trying to smuggle the tiger parts to Tibet, China, officials said.

On January 27, the Nepalese authorities seized three leopard skins in Kanchanpur district of Nepal, which is very close to a home of tigers in India, Uttarakhand. Tigers in Corbett National Park in the state had been under stress for some time because of increasing poaching threat in the tiger reserve having highest tiger density in the country.

Anil Baluni, former vice-chairperson of Uttarakhand Forest Advisory body, said the tiger syndicates were operating in Nepal and the Indian government has not effectively taken the issue with the Nepalese government to crush these organised groups in the area of wildlife crime. "There is a sense that smuggling of tiger body parts into Nepal has become easy in the last few months," he said.

The seizures in Nepal had some sort of relation with highest deaths of tigers in India in a decade. As many as 89 tigers died in 2012 in 41 notified tiger homes in India with poaching incidents reported from reserves in Maharashtra to Kerala and Assam.

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