The department of Forest, Environment and Climate Change today contested the previous tiger census trashing the report that Palamu Tiger Reserve houses only four big cats and decided to go for a rigorous sample collection to find out the exact count of tiger before next census.
The department trashed the report that the PTR, which covers part of Betla National Park and Palamu Wild life Sanctuary, is home to only four tigers and expressed that the earlier census of 2006 employed confusing methods even as insufficient samples were collected later on in 2010 to count presence of big cats thus leading to confusing results about the tiger population. Notably, the Wild life Institute of Dehradun has collected only 30 scat samples in 2010 for counting tiger in the PTR and came out that only four scats turned out to be that of the animal.
“Considering the size of the reserve a sample of 30 scats is insufficient and it would be increased to 500-600 for the next census so that the real figure comes out,” said Principal Secretary of the department, Sukhdev Singh, at a press conference here.
The only tiger reserve in Jharkhand is spread in 1129.23-sqkm which comprises 414-sqkm of the core area and around 715-sqkm of buffer zone. The department backed its claim of more number on two grounds—insufficient scat collection and the size of the reserve, which the officials expressed, provides enough space to more than 17 tigers to co-exist.
For better tiger conservation, the department has approached two consultants — Professor Raghuram, wild life scholar and Rajesh Gopal of Global Tiger Forum. The two experts would help the department in exploring measures to make tiger reserve comfortable for the animals and also facilitate government in shifting human colonies from tiger zone. Forest officials are pressing for restoring the earlier pattern for 100 per cent financing of conservation projects to improve state of the project. “The government would find it convenient in shifting human population from tiger zone as human population still exists in the tiger zone,” maintained Singh.
Meanwhile, ‘Gaj Project’ would be implemented to reduce human-elephant conflict in the rural areas of Jharkhand. Emphasis of the project will be on developing elephant corridors and mobilising local support to mitigate loss to man and animal in the conflict. The project will be patterned on a similar model of Chhattisgarh and will come into effect from financial year 2016-17.
“We will create village level committees, people will be trained and resources will be provided so that they can deal with elephants when it enters human area,” said PCCF, BC Nigam.
The department has received green signal and funds for setting up centres under Wild life Crime Control in all regional centres with head office at Ranchi to deal with man-animal conflict.