Big cats may go extinct in Odisha reserve

The tragedy at the Sarika and Panna reserve forests is set to be repeated. This time it could be in the eastern state of Odisha, where no tigers have been spotted for months in Satkosia, a forest habitat on the banks of Mahanadi river, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Apr 15, 2013, 01:53:27 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The tragedy at the Sarika and Panna reserve forests is set to be repeated. This time it could be in the eastern state of Odisha, where no tigers have been spotted for months in Satkosia, a forest habitat on the banks of Mahanadi river.

Satkosia is one of the newest homes for the feline in India with the state government declaring 963sq kms as tiger reserve in 2007. At that time, the forest in the gorge of Mahanadi in southern Odisha had officially 18 tigers.

A unique habitat having elephants, leopards, gharials and pangolins among other wildlife, it was considered a second viable tiger home in Odisha since Simlipal was out of bounds for the forest department because of high naxal presence in Mayurbanj district. “The forest had perfect environs to sustain good tiger population,” said a senior official of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA).

Things have dramatically changed in the last year or so with poachers increasing their assault on elephants and tigers. “Lot of elephants had been poached in that area. We believe they (poachers) would have also killed tigers,” said Biswajit Mohanty of Orissa Wildlife Society and member of National Board for Wildlife.

State forest department officials, however, ruled out poaching of tigers but admit that the big cat numbers has hit a nadir in recent times. “The problem is because of skewed sex ratio of the existing tiger population. The tigers have failed to repopulate as some male tigers died because of old age,” an official said.

The reserve had around a dozen tigers in 2010 when the last estimation was done and the forest department claimed that the numbers would increase as most of the tigers were young and breeding. Two years down the line, they have been proven wrong with cameras installed recently failing to catch photographs of tigers. “We were not able to see even cubs or juveniles,” an official said.

Officials admit that Satkosia was facing danger of extinction of local tiger population and there may be need to relocate tigers from other reserves as done in Sariska and Panna, from where tigers vanished in the last decade. Both Sariska in Rajasthan and Panna in Madhya Pradesh now have tiger numbers following successful translocation.

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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