Sariska tiger may have died due to poisoning

The translocated tiger in Sariska was apparently poisoned to death and was not a victim of territorial fight as top Rajasthan forest officials had claimed on Monday.

Updated on: Nov 16, 2010, 23:44:38 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The translocated tiger in Sariska was apparently poisoned to death and was not a victim of territorial fight as top Rajasthan forest officials had claimed on Monday.

The post-mortem of the tiger, translocated from Ranthambore in 2004, showed no injury marks. The initial viscera examination indicates poisoning. “The minister (Jairam Ramesh) is furious and that’s why he is rushing to Sariska tomorrow morning,” an environment ministry official said on Tuesday.

National Tiger Conservation Authority member-secretary Rajesh Gopal, who returned from Sariska on Tuesday and submitted a report to Ramesh was not available for comment.

In a damage-control exercise, the Rajasthan government suspended two officials — deputy field director B Praveen and assistant field director Mukesh Saini — for negligence leading to the death of the tiger, codenamed ST-1 (Sariska Tiger-1).

Rajasthan’s principal secretary (forests) VS Singh said the officials were suspended as they were not able to track the tiger even though it had been missing for more than a week. “The tiger had died five days ago but the officials failed to notice it. This is utter negligence. Earlier too, the casual attitude of officials in Sariska led to the loss of all tigers from the reserve. But this time no negligence will be tolerated,” he said.

Ramesh is likely to announce suspension of Wildlife Institute of India’s tiger relocation monitoring team at Sariska on Wednesday.

“For four days the forest department officials were not able to locate the tiger despite it being radio-collared,” said former Project Tiger Director P K Sen in New Delhi. A radio collar is a global positioning device used for tracking animals in the wild. The second relocated tiger was untraceable for the past four days. The state’s forest officials claimed the missing tiger’s pug marks were spotted near a temple in the Sariska reserve. “The episode is indicative of the mess in Sariska,” Sen said.

Ramesh on Tuesday admitted there were “governance and administrative” problems in the Rajasthan’s tiger relocation programme but did not agree with independent experts that the project had failed. “The programme has been implemented in consultation with best experts in the country,” Ramesh said.

Sen and NCTA member Valmik Thapar have asked Ramesh to suspend the tiger relocation programme until wider consultations are held with independent experts.

With inputs from HTC, Jaipur

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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