Tigers vanishing elsewhere, but Maharashtra minister ‘finds’ 65 new ones

Amid the uproar over the vanishing tiger population, Maharashtra Forest Minister Babanrao Pachpute today claimed the number of big cats have...

Amid the uproar over the vanishing tiger population, Maharashtra Forest Minister Babanrao Pachpute today claimed the number of big cats have gone up in the state.

Just weeks ago, the Centre had filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court saying 122 tigers had been poached in five years with Maharashtra alone accounting for 23 killings. Now, Pachpute is displaying the findings of a survey, which reports that the number of tigers in the state has shot up from 238 to 303 in the past four years.

He said the Forest Department ‘‘woke up’’ to do a reality check at the Melghat reserve and two other sanctuaries at Pench and Tadoba after reports about the Sariska crisis.

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But if tiger population in the state has increased in the last four years, why did the affidavit say that 23 tigers had been killed in Maharashtra’s forests around the same period?

‘‘I don’t want to dispute the claim. All I can say is that our information is different,’’ the minister shot back.

Wildlife experts in Maharashtra, however, lend no credence to these findings. Bittu Sehgal, editor of Sanctuary magazine, who works with Maharashtra’s Forest Department on such projects, said the survey method needed upgrading.

‘‘To date, wildlife estimations have followed somewhat inexact methodologies. Over the next five years, we will work with the forest department using DNA and camera-trapping methods to get more accurate figures,’’ Sehgal told Express.

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But there’s no stopping the minister. Pachpute has even claimed that the population of leopards have gone up by 200 from 513 in 2001 to 713 in the recent survey. ‘‘More details would be available in a fortnight,’’ he added.