All not lost: Tigers alive in Kuno

After a year of disappearing tigers, 2006 has started off on a promising note.

Published on: Jan 28, 2006, 03:14:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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After a year of disappearing tigers, 2006 has started off on a promising note. Last year, the Kuno wildlife sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh had joined a list of other reserves where tigers were said to have gone missing. But now, fresh evidence suggests that the big cats are still on the prowl.

A team of students from the Delhi University's Environment Biology department went on a tiger trail and spotted pugmarks and tiger scat in the sanctuary. "We believe these are of two tigress and a cub. It's possible a male tiger is also around," team leader Faiyaz Khudsar told the Hindustan Times.

The new revelation has generated a lot of enthusiasm among conservationists as the state government's 2005 census had said that there were no tigers in the sanctuary. "It was an extensive survey in which the forest officials failed to find pugmarks and officially declared that there are no tigers in Kuno," an official said.

But the student team proved the officials wrong. "There were tigers which the officials failed to spot as they may have examined a small area. There is something wrong with the census system of state governments which needs to be corrected," Khudsar said. Earlier, the Rajasthan government had claimed that tigers still survived in Sariska, when, in fact, there was none.

The cheering development might revive the Uttar Pradesh government’s plan to set up a lion safari in the region.

The Central Zoo Authority has accepted the proposal in principle but is awaiting a nod for the transfer of lions to Chambal from Gir Sanctuary in Gujarat.

"The project is stalled as Gujarat government is not willing to relocate the lions even though the habitat is not sufficient to support so many lions," a government official 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

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