Four tigers — two male and two female — will soon be on their way to the Panna reserve in Madhya Pradesh, to revive the population of the big cats there. They will join two tigresses shifted to the park earlier, reports Chetan Chauhan. Bunch of lies unravelled
Four tigers — two male and two female — will soon be on their way to the Panna reserve in Madhya Pradesh, to revive the population of the big cats there.
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They will join two tigresses shifted to the park earlier.
While this comes as good news for the park, it also makes it clear that there are no longer any male tigers in the park — a fact that has been suspected for long but which the state government has denied so far.
HT had in December 2008 reported that Panna — spread across 540 sq km — had probably lost all its tigers. But the state forest department, while admitting that all the tigresses were dead, kept insisting a male had been spotted.
Even the Union Environment Ministry backed the state and allowed the relocation of the two tigresses — one each from the Bhandhavgarh and Kanha reserves, within 300 km of Panna. “It will help us revive the tiger population as we already have a male in the reserve,” L.K. Chaudhary, director of Panna, had told HT.
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But the clamour over tiger deaths did not die down with that assurance. The ministry finally constituted a Special Investigation Team, which last week told the government that all of Panna’s native tigers were dead. That prompted the ministry to approve the state government’s proposal for the relocation of a tiger to Panna and increased the number to four on the recommendation of the Wildlife Institute of India.
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But the clamour over tiger deaths did not die down with that assurance. The ministry finally constituted a Special Investigation Team, which last week told the government that all of Panna’s native tigers were dead. That prompted the ministry to approve the state government’s proposal for the relocation of a tiger to Panna and increased the number to four on the recommendation of the Wildlife Institute of India.
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Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has also asking the state forest department to fix responsibility for the death of 30 deaths since 2004.
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.
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