Tigers can now return home

If everything goes according to plan, Sariska will get tigers in a year's time, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Oct 23, 2006, 05:27:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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If everything goes according to plan, Sariska will get tigers in a year's time, say officials of the Ministry of Environment and Forests. In 2004, tigers had gone missing from the tiger reserve because of rampant poaching.

Now, in a major breakthrough, the Centre has been able to convince the Rajasthan government to relocate two villages out of the Sariska Tiger Reserve. According to Rajesh Gopal, director, Project Tiger, the central government will give Rs 1 lakh each to over 60 families as an incentive to move out of the reserve. The Rajasthan government too will give Rs 1 lakh to each family apart from allocating farming land some distance away from the reserve.

While the Centre has already released money for the relocation, ministry officials said a strategy to deal with other issues related to tiger safety would be discussed with the Rajasthan government at a meeting in Delhi on October 30.

"We have called a meeting with the conservator of forest, Rajasthan, to prepare a schedule to settle the remaining issues," said Gopal.

Three key issues likely to be discussed at the meeting are that of limited visits to a historical temple within the tiger reserve, the use of a road tehsil level road crisscrossing through the reserve and replacing the old forest staff with younger people.

“About 30-40 per cent posts in the tiger reserve are vacant,” said an official.

Officials say restricting visitors to the temple is a major issue as religious sentiments of the people in many villages around the reserve are involved.

“We don't want to relocate the temple or stop pilgrimage there,” said an official. “But there should be some sort of restriction on the number of visitors and the timing for visits.” The Rajasthan government is yet to agree to this.

On the road issue, the two governments are working on a plan to construct an alternative road. Till that is done, the present road will continue to be used but the ministry is demanding that a speed limit be imposed.

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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