The much-hyped inter-state tiger relocation project, India’s first, has come a cropper three years after it was launched at Odisha’s Satkosia tiger reserve and also put a question mark over such projects in the future. On March 23, Sundari—the Royal Bengal Tiger brought from Bandhavgarh in Madhya Pradesh along with a male tiger Mahaveer—was sent back to her original home. Mahaveer’s was found dead just a few months after it was translocated, suspected to have been poached.
Sundari-Mahaveer were the first of the three pairs of tigers proposed to be brought from various reserves in tiger-rich Madhya Pradesh to the 963.87 sq km Satkosia reserve where the population of tigers had come down to just two from 12 when it was declared a reserve in 2007.
But the project ran into rough weather virtually from day one. The two tigers left in Satkosia before the arrival of the guests from MP were already occupying the only prey-rich area in the reserve and did not allow the newcomer to enter its territory. As a result, Sundari strayed into villages on the park’s fringes in search of food, leading to an inevitable human-animal conflict. On September 13, 2018, Sundari killed a woman and followed it up with mauling a 65-year-old man on October 22.
Predictably, all hell broke loose after the twin killings, with villagers venting their ire by damaging forest department property and setting fire to a boat. Concerned at the fallout, forest department officials chased Sundari for two weeks before zeroing in on her in November and bringing her into an enclosure after tranquilisation. There she stayed till a team from Madhya Pradesh arrived last week to take her back as per directive of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA). She would stay in the Ghorela centre for a few weeks before being released into the Kanha tiger reserve after her re-wilding is complete, says Sanjay Kumar Singh, Director of the Kanha Tiger Reserve (KTR). Barely eight days after Sundari was captured, Mahaveer was found dead.
Conservationist Biswajit Mohanty believes the project was badly conceived and poorly executed. “For one thing, no assessment of the ground situation was undertaken before the tigers were brought in from MP. There are about 112 villages on the fringes of the reserve and about 50,000 cattle go into the forests to graze every day. So, a conflict was bound to happen. The project was driven by a desire to boost tourism in Satkosia. But the people were not taken into confidence nor was any consultation held with them before the tiger translocation project was undertaken. Besides, Satkosia does not have adequate prey base to sustain an increase in tiger population at present,” he says. About Rs 8 crore out of the sanctioned Rs 19 crore was spent on the failed project.
But does the Sundari fiasco mean the end of such translocation in the future? Mohanty doesn’t think so. “There is no reason to jettison the idea for good…But we can only hope that any such future initiative will be taken up only after due diligence and a proper, comprehensive assessment of the ground realities,” he says.
By Sandeep Sahu in Bhubaneswar
