One of Indias main tiger parks – Panna National Park – has admitted it no longer has any tigers. The park, in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, was part of the countrys efforts to save the famous Royal Bengal Tiger from extinction, BBC online reports Tuesday.
State Minister of Forests Rajendra Shukla said that the reserve, which three years ago had 24 tigers, no longer had any. A special census was conducted in the park by a premier wildlife institute, after the forest authorities reported no sightings of the animals for a long time.
This is the second tiger reserve iin India, after Sariska in Rajasthan, where numbers have dwindled to zero.
A report prepared by the central forest ministry says wildlife authorities failed to see the impending disaster despite repeated warnings, and lost most of Pannas big cats to poaching.
There have been reports that another national park in Madhya Pradesh, Sanjay National Park, which was included in the tiger project three years ago, also has no tigers left. The park had a population of 15 tigers until the late 1990s.
Of the more than 1.400 tigers in the country, 300 dwell in the state of Madhya Pradesh, which is also called the “tiger state of India”.
India had 40.000 tigers a century ago, but the numbers dwindled fast because of hunting and poaching. The country banned tiger hunting and launched an ambitious conservation effort named Project Tiger to increase the population of the endangered species.
A number of forest areas were declared national parks and funds allotted for protecting the tigers. Though the programme bore fruit initially, with the decline in numbers checked because of a hunting ban, recent years have seen a phenomenal rise in poaching, which is now organised almost along the lines of drug-smuggling.
