3 in dock over tigress death

The Madhya Pradesh forest department is investigating whether officials allowed relatives of a state cabinet minister inside Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve late in the night, resulting in the accidental death of a tigress.

Updated on: May 26, 2010, 23:00:14 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Madhya Pradesh forest department is investigating whether officials allowed relatives of a state cabinet minister inside Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve late in the night, resulting in the accidental death of a tigress.

Forest officials found the dead tigress on May 21 after being alerted by tourists who saw the animal in pain. The post-mortem revealed that a fast-moving vehicle had hit her.

“Efforts are still on to trace the vehicle that hit the tigress,” said a senior state forest department official, refusing to comment on whether a minister’s relatives were present in the reserve, 481 km from Bhopal, that night. “All aspects are being investigated.”

The forest department has, however, suspended three officials. One allegedly accompanied the minister’s relatives. “We would like to know what one of the suspended officials was doing in Bandhavgarh, which was not under his jurisdiction,” said P.K. Sen, former director of Project Tiger.

It was alleged that the vehicle in which they were travelling accidentally hit the tigress, after which they fled. The carcass was found next morning.

State forest minister Sartaj Singh said the officials had been suspended for not cooperating with the investigation and for being absent on the day of the incident. In a report submitted to the National Tiger Conservation Authority on Wednesday, the state government said an assistant director and two range officers had been suspended for negligence.

Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has sought a report from the chief minister.

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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