JAIPUR OCTOBER 13: A Few days ago when forest officials of Rajasthan held 27-year-old Kalya Bawaria in a village near Sikar, they thought he was among the dozen-odd poachers who had wiped out the tiger from Sariska. His confession to police, however, is a blow-by-blow record of ‘‘shocking details’’ of poachings in the reserve over the past four years that saw a total clean-up. Bawaria himself killed five tigers and dozens of leopards.
The spate of poachings began in 2001 when Jeevan and Suratiya, two Bawaria men from a village in Panipat came to Rajasthan and began building a network of poachers. The two were agents for poacher and smuggler Sansar Chand.
The two soon met Kalya Bawaria in Chaandera in Dausa and roped him in with his brothers Balya and a relative Phulya among others. Armed with high-quality snares, Jeevan and Suratiya trained the poachers and left them with advance payments for supplying tiger skin—the going rate Rs 30,000 per kill.
In early 2002, the poachers moved to the outskirts of Sariska and began visiting the villages on the periphery. The villagers, eager to keep graze their cattle without fearing the tiger, helped them by charting the animals’ movements. The traps were set up mainly near watering holes. ‘‘They had such strong snares that once a tiger got trapped, it was impossible for it to break free. The poachers managed to kill every tiger they trapped,’’ says Rajasthan PCCF R.N. Mehrotra, who tracked down the poachers.
The skins were passed on to a local villager who would hand it over to the smuggler. By 2004, no less than 11 tigers and 30 leopards had been captured and killed.
