17th Feb., 2019


One of India’s first tiger habitats, declared a protected forest reserve in 1973 when Project Tiger was launched, may have lost all its tigers, according to two crucial scientific methods to track big cats in the wild.

No tiger has been seen in Palamau Tiger Reserve (PTR) on camera trap pictures clicked since 2016, and a scat analysis (in which faeces is used to identify animals) conducted this year has found no evidence of a tiger in the forest, according to officials familiar with the matter.

Once officially confirmed, this will make PTR the third reserve in the country — after Sariska in Rajasthan and Panna in Madhya Pradesh — from where tigers vanished, even though the national population of tigers has risen from 1,114 in 2006 to 2,226 in 2014. Tigers have been relocated to Sariska and Panna over the last decade. The population is 17 tigers including cubs and 37 in the two reserves respectively.

A national tiger census has been underway since 2018 and its findings are expected to be published in May 2019. The scat analysis and camera traps are part of the 2018 All India Tiger Estimation’s (AITE) comprehensive methodology to calculate the tiger population in the country.

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