A decade of living in the forests of Madhya Pradesh provided IAS officer Raghav Chandra insights into various threats that the country’s tigers face, which he has penned in a new fiction.
Chandra’s book, Scent of a Game, was launched here on Friday by former Chief Election Commissioner SY Quraishi, who also stressed on the importance of raising awareness about the endangered animal species.
Set in the heartland of Madhya Pradesh, the fiction published by Rupa, deals with rampant killings of tigers in forests with the narrative revolving around “Buree Maada”, a tigress who goes missing from the Kanha Tiger reserve. The book, Chandra said, “is set in 2006 and falls under the larger umbrella of a wildlife thriller.”
“It intends to acquaint the reader with the numerous stake holders in tiger conservation - tribes, local villagers, forest officials, bureaucrats and conservationists,” Chandra said.
“The take home from the book is conservation in a karmic way,” Chandra said. In 2006 when the author was posted in MP, he said “the reported death toll was practically one tiger-a-day” in the reserves of Kanha and Panna.
Major issues like illegal trade of the endangered species, game hunting, criminal tribes as well as need for environmental management have been woven into the fiction.
“Fiction allows for easy consciousness of the writer, one is not fettered by any laws or the Government and it gives us more freedom to create characters and situations according to our will. It is a more powerful method,” Chandra said.
WWF CEO Ravi Singh and Rajesh Gopal, Member Secretary of National Tiger Conservation Authority participated in a panel discussion on the role of corporates, conservationists and Government bodies in the conservation of tigers following the event.