Interesting email exchange

Interesting email exchange between Deepali and your truly. Deepali is a naturalist, photographer and economist from Delhi. I got her permission to share this on the blog. From: Deepali Sharma Sanwal Date: Tue, 12 May 2009 11:11:25 +0530 To: Aditya Singh Subject: hi from Delhi Hi Aditya Hello from Delhi. Read your blog.. wanted to…

Migration

Recently a judge in the Rajasthan High Court passed a ruling that Ranthambhore should be closed for 2 days in a week so that the animals can get “rest” from tourists. The Park is shut for tourists during the monsoons from July to end September. The people living around the park have a free run…

February 2005

After the Operation Co-operation came to a premature end, all of us got pretty frustrated. I got back to my work, which is running a safari lodge an since February is a very busy month; I did not have time for any further activism. Dharmendra and Vakil (the Tiger watch team) took to some serious…

Operation Co-operation III

After our successful raid of 29th January 2005, where we busted Rajmal Mogiya (who much later on admitted to his involvement in the killing of 5 tigers), we were on top of the world. The paper work after the raid took all night to complete and we went to sleep around 10:00 AM the next…

Operation Co-operation II

On the 29th of January 2005, Vakil got some information about a Mogiya tribal – Rajmal -who was regularly killing and selling the meat of Sambar deer and Wild Boar, in Bhairopura village in the Man Singh Sanctuary, a part of the Ranthambore Tiger Reserve. We met the Deputy Field Director – Mr. Bhardwaj –…

Operation Co-operation I

By the second week of January 2005, the Tiger watch team had started working on a presen-tation to highlight what they thought was wrong with the Ranthambore national park. They wanted to show this on a seminar of “WWF India” , which was to be held on 27th January in Delhi. The problems that they…

Sariska disclosure

By the middle of January 2005, it became public that there were no tigers left in Sariska ti-ger reserve in north-eastern Rajasthan. It was the Indian national daily – “Indian Express” – that first broke this news. Incidentally, this is the same newspaper, that had over a decade earlier broken the news about the Second…

The Third Tiger Crisis – 2003 onwards

The period between early 1990s (after the Second Tiger Crisis) and early 2000s was “by and large” a stable time for tigers in the Project Tiger Reserves. However, during this time tigers of a few reserves, particularly the ones that had insurgency and naxalite problem, such as Manas, Valmiki, Namdapha etc. got decimated. Besides the…

The Second Tiger Crisis – Early 1990s

The Project Tiger had a very successful run from its inception to the late 1980s. However, after the heady early year, when the Project Tiger was a great success and it was clear that the tiger population was recovering, the project fell into widespread complacency until, in the early 1990s, tigers disappeared in the famous…

The First Tiger Crisis and Project Tiger

It is estimated that there were nearly 40,000 tigers in the wild in India in 1900. Even if we consider this to be a slight exaggeration there were still a lot of tigers in India at that time. Today, according to the Government there are 3500 tigers but in reality there are less than 2000…