The fear of Maoists is making forest officials slowly lose their grip on the reserves in the red corridor.
Maoists have taken control of at least seven tiger reserves and forest officials are too scared to enter these and conduct a census. India has 38 tiger reserves and 1,411 tigers live in them.
The fear of Maoists is making forest officials slowly lose their grip on the reserves in the red corridor. A forest post was recently attacked by Maoists in the Simlipal tiger reserve in Orissa.
The previous tiger census carried out in 2007 did not show any figures for three of these reserves because forest personnel have stopped entering them. The remaining four have 116 tigers but the government is not able to take steps to protect them.
“Earlier, we used to believe the presence of Maoists in jungles is good for tigers, but that is not so. It’s because poachers enter these reserves with local help and hunt down tigers. All seven are low-density reserves,” said a senior official in the environment ministry.
“We are unable to protect wild animals because forest officials are too scared to go inside these jungles. They fear being attacked and this is not a good sign,” said the official.
The out-of-bounds reserves are Indravati in Chhattisgarh, Valmiki in Bihar, Manas in Assam, Nagarjunasagar-Srisailam in Andhra Pradesh, Buxa in West Bengal, Palamu in Jharkhand and Simlipal in Orissa.
The ground situation is worse in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Assam where officials don’t even know how many tigers still exist. Officials said since Indravati, Manas and Palamu don’t have a census, the ministry has only stated that there are tigers in the reserves without giving their status. Interestingly, the government has given more than Rs50 crore to the seven reserves in the past five years to protect the animals.
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