22nd April, 2018


Citing cases of disappearance of tigers in Rajasthan, the Centre has alleged that tourism has assumed primacy in the state over basic ecological tenets resulting in dispersal of the big cats.

Further, in spite of capacity building of frontline forest personnel, monitoring was not up to the mark and periodically tigers were reported missing, it said.

“Even today, it has been reported that tiger ST-5 is missing and ST-11 was reported dead in spite of intensive monitoring,” Union Environment, Forest and Climate Change Minister Harsh Vardhan said in a recent letter to Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje.

In the letter, he said a two-phased project titled monitoring of re-introduced tigers in the Sariska Tiger Reserve was instituted in joint collaboration with the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), the Wildlife Institute of india (WII) and the state of Rajasthan.

The project was designed with the overreaching objective of monitoring re-introduced tigers and in process develop capacity of frontline forest staff in state-of-the-art monitoring protocols, it said.

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