A year has passed after the Task Force on tigers, headed by environmentalist Sunita Narayan, submitted its reports to the Union Government, expressing deep concern over the decline in the tiger population and mismanagement in major tiger sanctuaries, but the report seems to have had little effect on the State.
The tiger population in Orissa during last 15 years has reduced from 226 in 1993 to 192 in 2004 for which poaching was pitched as the main reason.
Tigers in Orissa are under threat and their survival now depends on a variety of factors. Some decades ago the distribution of tigers in the forests of Orissa was wide and almost all districts of the State housed them in their forests. But from the early 1980s many forest areas started depleting and poaching went on unabated. Wildlife activists believe deforestation due to shifting cultivation, construction of large dams and reservoirs and encroachments have played a major role in reducing the tiger population. Except in the Similipal Tiger Reserve, Orissa's only tiger reserve where population of tigers has remained static for more than a decade, the onslaught on the tiger habitat has been severe.
Forests of the Sunabeda Wildlife Sanctuary in Nuapada district has shown a healthy increase in tiger numbers since 1995, and this forest patch along with the forests of adjoining the Khariar Forest Division has the best potential for survival of tigers after Similipal.
Even after intensive campaigns since 1997 for inclusion of the forests of Satkosia-Gorge and Baisipalli under the Project Tiger scheme, there has been a delay on the part of the Union Government to bring these under the scheme.
Satkosia has always been severely hit by an organised timber and ivory mafia, and its inclusion under the Project Tiger scheme might reverse this trend.
Due to problems of deforestation and poaching, which is rampant in the forests of Orissa, tiger population in most of the districts have shown a downward trend. The Sariska syndrome has been here for last ten years in Nowrangpur, Puri, Dhenkanal, Deogarh, Sundargarh, Keonjhar, Balasore, Bhadrak, Jajpur, Kendrapara, Cuttack, Jagatsinghpur, Bolangir, Parlakhemundi and Koraput districts which once harboured a very healthy population of wild tigers.
Even, at that time Prime Minister Manmohan Singh vented his ire over the gradual decline of wild cats, he was, in fact, echoing the sentiments of a whole nation, shocked to learn the damning Ranthambore and Sariska stories which sent the entire cabinet and officials in a tizzy. The conservationists mince no words while castigating the Sariska, Panna, Ranthambore and Smilipal Tiger Reserves' officials. According to reports, tiger population in the State was 142 in 1972, while the figure was not impressive, in the whole country, only 1,827 tigers were estimated. At that time, Orissa shared 8 per cent to whole population of tigers in the country. But reports of 2004 revealed at least 192 tigers are in Orissa while the total population of tigers stood at 487, thus 40 per cent of the country's tigers falling in Orissa's share. But it is a decline any way from what the State had just some years back. Decrease in tiger population from more than 226 in 1993 to less than 200 in 2004 is a phenomenal decline.
