29 tigers gone in 3 months, Govt sits up

Master blaster Sachin Tendulkar’s support to the campaign to save tigers could not have come at a better time with the country losing 29 tigers in less than three months this year.

Updated on: Mar 21, 2009, 01:02:50 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

Master blaster Sachin Tendulkar’s support to the campaign to save tigers could not have come at a better time with the country losing 29 tigers in less than three months this year.

Ten tigers have died in Kaziranga sanctuary in Assam and seven in Kanha in Madhya Pradesh in last few months.

Based on the feedback from state governments and NGOs, the Environment ministry has sent teams of the Wildlife Crime Bureau and National Tiger Conservation Authority to investigate the cause of the deaths. “If this is a trend, then we have to stop it,” said an Environment ministry official.

“Many of these deaths have been the result of territorial fights caused by the degradation of habitat outside the core area, said Tito Joseph of the Wildlife Protection Society of India.

While the poaching incidents are on the decline, experts are alarmed at poor habitat quality becoming a cause for tiger conflict with humans — like in Corbett National Park, where two tigers were declared man-eaters in recent past.

Not only Tendulkar, country’s top tiger experts like Belinda Wright, Valmik Thapar, Bitoo Sehghal and P.K. Sen have earlier asked the Union government to take immediate steps to protect tigers.

The steps suggested by them include looking into unscientific relocation methods and fixing accountability of officers in the areas where tiger population has fallen.

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

Check India news real-time updates, latest news on Hindustan Times and more across India.