Barring forced photo-ops with politicians, wild tigers have little to do with political constituencies. No surprise, therefore, that Dooars Rani, the tigress released into a bereft Buxa Tiger Reserve in Bengal by Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari on October 2, decided to wander off into neighbouring Assam. Since it strayed from the area where it was meant to be an attraction, the Bengal authorities pursued it for recapture and return. Buxa has become a cautionary poster for tiger conservation since it does not have a significant number of resident tigers or even tiger presence. The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), in its last status report on the big cat, recorded just one tiger sharing the reserve with the Mahananda area, based on the 2022 data. The NTCA’s assessment favoured free movement, with security and connectivity, for tigers across the contiguous area of the Manas, Neora, Buxa and Mahananda blocks, since the overall density of the species was estimated to be 61 individuals. Dooars Rani, originally brought from Bihar and apparently the first of four to be released in the reserve, acted naturally when she decided to walk to Raimona National Park in Assam. If conditions in Buxa are made optimal, tigers from other areas are bound to migrate to it. What Bengal should be doing, therefore, is to check the health of the prey base and reduce human pressures that depress tiger numbers. Quite extraordinarily, the state forest minister said a few days ago that the tigress may have to be caged for a while to prevent it from getting affected by Diwali cracker blasts in nearby habitations.
It would be terribly tragic for politicians to see charismatic wildlife species as showpieces that must confine themselves to political boundaries to produce success stories of conservation. Reserves cannot be treated as large zoos; neither is it productive to pursue a policy of laissez-faire on environmental governance marked by rampant forest clearance, road building in and around reserves, and expanding mining on the one hand, while launching repopulation schemes for large carnivores like tigers and cheetahs that need extensive ranges and robust prey numbers on the other. As tiger scientists like to point out, the country’s tiger reserves exist in about 5% of protected land, surrounded by enormous human pressures. If governments are unwilling to commit themselves to preserving the integrity of sanctuaries and national parks, including their buffer zones, the prey base comes under pressure, and human-animal conflicts will increase. Buxa has a core tiger habitat area of 390 sq km, according to the NTCA data, and a buffer of 370 sq km. The NTCA says it suffers from pressure exerted by habitations in the buffer zone and surrounding tea estates. To give animals like Dooars Rani a chance at repopulating the reserve, Bengal must focus on creating enough safe room.
