Now Reading: Centre plans to reintroduce tigers at Buxa reserve, minister says
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Centre plans to reintroduce tigers at Buxa reserve, minister says
Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav on Saturday announced the Centre's plan to reintroduce the Royal Bengal Tiger into Buxa Tiger Reserve in Alipurduar, nearly 40 years after the reserve lost its resident tiger population. The minister said direct discussions with the West Bengal government will be held and that breeding and reintroduction will follow National Tiger Conservation Authority guidelines.
Preparations are expected to be completed by September 15. During the annual three-month forest closure from June 15, the Buxa Forest Division will accelerate relocation of villages inside the reserve. Officials plan to strengthen the prey base with more spotted deer. Three or six tigers, in a ratio of two females to one male, may be brought from Manas, Kaziranga or Valmiki national parks.
The announcement follows camera-trap sightings of transient tigers in 2021, 2022 and 2023, believed to have strayed from Bhutan or Assam. Buxa was declared virtually tigerless in the 2010, 2014 and 2018 national tiger censuses, while the Sundarbans reserve has over 100 tigers. Wildlife expert Joydeep Kundu thanked both the state and central governments for the initiative.
Indian Opinion Analysis
Buxa's tigerlessness has been a known gap in India's conservation map for over a decade. The reserve, part of the Eastern Himalayas biodiversity hotspot, lost its resident tigers primarily due to poaching and habitat fragmentation from forest villages. Two of those villages have been relocated, the remaining ones must be shifted before any reintroduction can succeed. A similar exercise at Panna Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh, where tigers were reintroduced in 2009 after being locally extinct, saw the population grow to over 50 in a decade. The September deadline is ambitious: relocating human settlements, rebuilding prey base, and establishing a founder population requires coordinated state-centre action. The next concrete signal to watch is whether the West Bengal government clears the village rehabilitation plan before the monsoon closure ends.
Source: millenniumpost.in
This story was synthesised by AI from the source linked above. Methodology and corrections.
