Aditya ‘Dicky’ Singh

If you had visited Ranthambhore in 2006 for a few days you, chances are you would have seen the Guda tigress with her two male cubs. This highly visible family had delighted a large number of tourists with their easy sightings. One of these two males, now fully grown, called Yuvraj, was killed by poachers a month or so ago. He was killed near a place called Lakheri, which is about 30 kilometers from the edge of the Ranthambhore National park, by a group of 7 “mogiya” tribal poachers. The Forest Department arrested one of these 7 poachers about 10 days ago and they made this news public yesterday. This man –goes by two names (as many Mogiyas do) - Ramswaroop Mogiya or Sanwarmal Mogiya. He is a resident of a small village near Lakheri, where many Mogiyas stay. And believe me, the Mogiyas of Lakeri area are no friends of wildlife.

Yuvraj’s brother, who is known in Ranthambhore as the “Collared male” because of the radio collar that has been fitted on his neck by the Forest Department. He was the only tiger in Ranthambhore to be radio-collared till a few days ago, when two more were radio collared.

These two male cubs were born during the monsoon months of 2004, in an area called Guda at the southern edge of Ranthambhore national park. Guda lies at the heart of the territory of their mother, who is known as the Guda tigress. When these cubs were small they were very shy, as most cubs are. We only got to see them during the onset of summers of 2005. Before that there sightings were rare. When they were about a year old they got used to vehicles and their sightings became very frequent. In fact between summers of 2005 to the end of winters in 2006 (when the two cubs finally separated from their mother), we started calling Guda a zoo because it was so easy to find this family.

There was a TV crew staying with us in June 2005. They had come to shoot tigers for NBS, which is one of Japan’s largest TV channels. Salim (Ranthambhore’s best guide) and I were assisting this crew. All through June we had some great times with this family. We saw them interacting as a family, playing in water, play fighting with each other and even making a kill.

At that time there was a male tiger called “Jhumroo” (see picture above) who took over as the dominant male of an area called Lahpur, that lies close to Guda. Jhumroo was not the father of these cubs and so posed a serious threat to the two cubs. However, their mother was older than Jhumroo and always managed to keep Jhumroo from encroaching into her territory. We once found the Guda tigress and her two cubs sitting in a waterhole at a place called Nagdi. After a few minutes the two cubs just got up without a warning and ran away from us, while the mother started snarling at us. Soon she got up from the water and charged in our direction (see picture below).

She went right past our jeep and straight into the bushes behind our jeep. We heard another tiger in these bushes and almost immediately there was fight (that we could hear but not see). A few minutes later the mother came out of the bushes and walked rapidly to where the cubs were hiding. And just a few minutes after that we saw Jhumroo coming out and walking back towards Guda, with a slight limp and a big dent to his ego (see picture below).

By the end of winter of 2006 the two cubs had separated from their mother. Initially they stayed together in an area called Phoota Kot for a few weeks. I once saw Yuvraj and his brother (see picture below) trying to hunt Sambar deer together, without much success. This was a difficult time for the two brothers because they had not mature as hunters and the other dominant males of the area, mainly Jhumroo and a male that we call the X male, would not let them establish their territories easily. Soon Yuvraj drifted out of the national park to the Man Singh Sanctuary, while his brother established his territory in the Soleshewar – Dumduma – Sultanpur area, where he is still seen often. To be fair to the officers of Ranthambhore national park, they did keep excellent track of Yuvraj. In fact they had a team of trackers constantly following his trail. After spending a few months in Man Singh Sanctuary, where he was reasonably well protected, he once strayed right out to Ramgarh Sanctuary in Bundi district. He was in dangerous territory now because there is very little protection in Bundi and the place is full of poachers. On that occasion the Forest officials of Ranthambhore managed to somehow get him back to Man Singh Sanctuary. Don’t ask me how they did this but they did manage it after a lot of effort.

In the end of October 2007 he once again drifted back from Man Singh anctuary and never returned. We heard that he had killed a cow near Lakheri. Some trackers from the Forest Department were rushed to the place where he had killed the cow but they could not locate him. After that there was no news of Yuvraj, despite the fact that a whole load of forest guards, volunteers etc were looking for him. About 10 days ago a Mogiya was caught by the Forest Department acting on a tip off and he confessed that he was part of the 8 persons who killed Yuvraj.

What hurts me the most is that the Guda tigress managed to save her cubs from the poachers when tiger poaching in Ranthambhore was at its peak. This male survived the worst time that Ranthambhore had seen in the last decade or so but was poached when tiger poaching in Ranthambhore is under control.

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I just got a mail from Doctor Dharmendra Khandal, the Field Biologist of Tiger” title=”http://ranthambhore.blogspot.com/2005_12_01_archive.html>Tiger” target=”_blank”>ranthambhore.blogspot.com/2005_12_01_archive.html>Tiger Watch and has been in Ranthambhore since. In early 2005 Dharmendra and I were instrumental in getting the Operation Co-operation launched by the then Deputy Field Director of Ranthambore national park - Mr. G S Bhardwaj. After this operation was called off we were all very dejected but soon Dharmendra decided to start a full fledged (in terms of action and delivery and not in term of funds) anti poaching program and did it in style. Right now he is enemy number one for tiger poachers.

Just two days ago he got some information about a group of

Dear boss,

It was a preventive raid that we carried out in the early hours of the 2nd August 2007. As you have always said we should do something “before” tiger poaching happens and not “after” it happens. Till now we have only caught poachers after they had done their killing. What we did yesterday was preemptive.

My informer reported to me that fifteen Mogiyas families with 12 guns have crossed over from Madhya Pradesh (to the periphery of Ranthambhore tiger reserve) and waiting for the right time to enter the reserve. He also told us that about one third of these people were in a place near Sapotra, another one third were in Gangapur and he did not know where the rest were.

I personally met the Superintendent of Police Mr. Jose Mohan (a young and dynamic police officer who recently nabbed few notorious dacoits and other highly wanted criminals). After I briefed him about the information that I had got, he showed great interest and called up his best policeman for the raid.

Two police teams and our Tiger Watch team (three 4 wheel drive jeeps with 16 people in them) reached Amargarh Social Forestry Plantation, near Sapotra at 0400 hours in the morning and started the raid. Within two hours we had executed four operations and seized five guns and two poachers.

What would interest you are the linkages of these poachers, who were caught.

One of them – his name is Shankar alias Ram Karan – is Devi Singh Mogiya’s real uncle. He is wanted in Madhya Pradesh for various crimes, some of them related to wildlife. He has 10 sons, the eldest being 36 years old and the youngest 3 years old. All these 10 sons are part of the group that crossed over from Madhya Pradesh to enter Ranthambhore for poaching. This man and his older sons are seasoned poachers with a lot of experience. Five of his ten sons are adults and have their own guns. Two of these five – Ram Singh and Kalua – were active members of Devi Singh’s gang, when this gang had killed five tigers between 2003 and 2004. Devi Singh had confessed about their involvement on camera. By the way we did not catch any one of his sons. They were in the same area and are still there but we could not nab them. Maybe soon we will – before they strike.

The second man that we caught – Jagdish alias Bhuria Mogiya – is the real brother-in-law of Devi Singh Mogiya. We seized three guns from him. One was his. The other guns belonged to Ramawtar Mogya (son of Rajmal Mogiya – who we now realize is not really a “reformed poacher) and the third belonged to Afsar Mogya (son of Harji Mogya). The fourth gun belonged to Shankar (alias Ram Karan) and the fifth gun belonged to his son Ram Singh.

You would remember the day we caught Raj Mal Mogiya . You would also remember Devi Singh Mogiya of Uliyana village, who admitted to killing 6 tigers between 2003 and 2004. Harji is brother of two infamous tiger poachers Jugraj and Lakhan. Harji was killed by a leopard, he had shot and injured, in the same area where we had caught Rajmal Mogiya.

All this indicates that the “real bad guys” had run away from around Ranthambhore, after Operation Co operation, are now getting back or at least their younger progeny is. These guys are sons of master Mogiyas. I have enough evidence to show that they were deeply involved in tiger poaching in the period between 2002 and 2005.

Now story reveals one very dangerous fact. One of the guns that we caught – which belonged to Jagdish / Bhuriya Mogiya - was found from the house of a forest guard where he had kept it “safely”. We collected it from the forest guard’s family after convincing them to hand it over. At that time the Forest Guard - Kajod Mal Gurjar - was not in his house. He is currently posted in Gangapur plantation area where we caught all these guys.

Can you believe all these guys were found in the forest areas? They built their Tapri (temporary hutments) in the plantation areas run by the Forest Department. And Kajod is the guard in charge of these plantation areas. And this bastard was once a guard inside Ranthambhore tiger reserve. He has very good connection with these Mogaya poachers. How you will we save our tigers, if the guards are the ones helping the poachers?

Few other facts:

• Malarna Dunger to Gangapur is the main holding area of this community right now. This is a very remote area and totally ignored by the Forest Department and other Conservationists.

• More than 15 families of Madhya Pradesh Mogaya’s are settled in this area

• All have strong family connections with the local poachers like Rajmal, Lakhan etc.

• All belong to notorious Devi Singh Mogya’s family – probably the most dangerous of all the operators in Ranthambhore.

• All are settled here in Forest areas like plantations etc which are under the direct control of the Forest Department.

• All of them have strong relations with forest guards.

• Every body has illegal guns. 15 families therefore 15 guns.

• They are the “real bad guys” - purely nomadic type not like our Mogiyas, who are “some what” settled.

• They are all wanted in Madhya Pradesh for wildlife and other violent crimes.

• We have to think about a stronger and active information gathering system.

• Good thing during this raid is that I identified a few expert policemen in Sawai Madhopur. We have to spend some resources on these police personals to encourage or to involve them into this anti-poaching system. The Senior Superintend of Police is taking a strong interest in anti poaching operations, which is excellent news.

Regards,

Dharmendra Khandal, Field Biologist, Tiger Watch, Ranthambhore Tiger Reserve

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I got a mail from Roy Fallon - my good friend from UK. He is very keen on Indian wildlife and is a great friend of tigers. Lately he has been very concerned about the “tiger crisis” in India. I think every one interested in wild tigers should go through this mail exchange that we just had.

Dear Roy,

Nice to hear from you.

The tiger situation is indeed bad (to say the least).

It appears that the government of India (the Federal government) is waking up to it but we just hope they don’t take a few years to to do so. The Prime Minister has been giving some statements lately that the tiger situation is really bad and they have to take some urgent steps to correct it. They have “plans” to set up a nation wide cell against wildlife crime and a National Tiger Conservation Authority, something like the FBI. They are also planning to recruit retired military personnel to guard the tiger reserves. I really hope that these plans are implemented “properly” and soon. There is not much time left. In fact we are already about 6 to 7 years late.

I may not really be an authority on tigers in India but I do know much more than the average Joe and I foresee a few major problems with these plans:

1. Timing

If anything has to be done it has to be done now. The Indian government has a very strong tendency to delay implementation till it does not matter any more. Right now even a bad plan would do a lot of good if it is executed right away. Doing something right away is definitely better than doing nothing at all. I just hope that they do not keep planning and delay the implementation of the few ideas that they have. And believe me they have a very few ideas.

2. Data

It is a shame that we don’t have enough scientific data on tigers, their habitat and their problems. There is hardly any research material on tigers in India. Research on tiger was discouraged in all parts of India. Whatever little data that we do have is very basic and often faulty.

One Field Director of Ranthambhore tiger reserve had once told me that “we do not need any research on tigers. We know all there is to know about them and the problems that they face.” He then went on to tell me that “one of the biggest problems that tigers face is traffic jams from photographers.” Was this guy nuts? Yes he definitely was. The problem is that the Government has given him the authority to implement whatever weird ideas that he comes up with.

He was talking about “traffic jams by photographers” when people were shooting tigers all over Ranthambhore. A shot by a camera is forever but a shot from a gun is not. And what traffic jams was he talking about? In a Park like Ranthambhore – which probably gets one of the highest number of tourists out of all the tigers reserves in India – a maximum of 40 vehicles are permitted to go at any one time. These are divided into 5 different zone. So one zone does not have more than 8 vehicles at any given time. These vehicles have to stay on the man-made tracks in the zones. They just can not stray off the track, while the tiger can go where ever he pleases to go. When ever the tigers feels disturbed by visitor’s vehicles he just walks away from the tracks and that’s it. I have seen this repeatedly in Ranthambhore for the last 10 years.

We joke that when ever there is a wildlife related crime the Forest Department officials are the last people to know about it.

The data that is submitted from the field through the Forest Department is “faked” to make the Field officers look good. For instance “Tigers don’t get poached they migrate”, “habitat is never degraded”, “there is an annual 10% rise in tiger population in all India reserves”. The list goes on.

Conservation cannot work unless there is a good and regular supply of data, intelligence, observations etc. We just have to open up the parks to researchers from all over the world. I think that every protected area should have at least on team of researchers, that is neither responsible to the Forest Department nor funded by them.

3. Monitoring

As long as Indian tiger reserves do not have an independent monitoring team, the “faked” data will keep coming up. These teams should have total and unlimited access and they should report to a Centralized authority. Their funding should not be from the Forest Department and they should not be responsible to the Forest Department. Their finding should be published online and should be available to everyone in the world. Tigers belong to all of us on this planet. They are not the exclusive preserve of the Government of India. Even if no action is taken on the findings of such monitoring teams at least let the world know about what is really going on in the tigers reserves. Such teams should carry out an “annual audit” which should be submitted to the highest authority. Believe me nothing works like “Public Pressure”. This team should be different from the research team, like activists to scientists.

4. Role of the states

Forests and wildlife in India have a funny legal status. Technically Forest and Wildlife is a state subject. That means that it is controlled by the state government and not the Federal government. We have a Central authority (it was the Project Tiger a few months ago but it is called “National Tiger Authority” or something like that now) that gives directions to the state Forest Department but the directions are not binding on them. In fact the State Forest Department often has a mind of their own.

For instance the Project Tiger conducted a nation wide survey through the Wildlife Institute of India that came out with some horrifying results, such as, there are no more than 1300 tigers left in India, Madhya Pradesh barely has 250 or so tigers (and not 600 – 700 odd that they claim) and so on. However, most of the states (and it started with Madhya Pradesh) refuse to accept the census.

We have a weird situation here. The Prime Minister of India is going around saying that tigers are on the verge of extinction in India while the State Governments are saying that their state has no problems with tigers. There might be a problem with other states but none in their own state. If they don’t even acknowledge that they have a problem how the hell are they going to sort it out.

All the Tiger Reserves in India should be under the direct control of the Federal Government and not the State Government.

5. Role of Conservationists

We have a small group of “bleeding heart” conservationists in India who are a big stumbling block for any tiger conservation measure. They are part of the “planners” at the Central level and they come out with some of the weirdest ideas you can imagine. Most of them do not have any following at the ground level. They do not like new people to do any kind of conservation work.

I will give you an example: When tigers were decimated in Sariska tiger reserve in Rajasthan state (and they were nearly decimated in Ranthambhore, that lies in the same state) the Chief Minister of Rajasthan set up a “State Empowered Committee” of Rajasthan Government to look into the problems that tigers in Rajasthan face and to suggest solutions for the same. The Chairman of this committee was a Member of Parliament from Rajasthan and there were a few “well known conservationists” in the committee. When the committee was formed we thought that the Chairman will push the issue under the carpet but the “conservationist” members will kick some ass. What finally happened was exactly the opposite. The “so called conservationists” diluted the issue while the “only man” in the entire committee turned out to the the Chairman.

It is high time the Government “expanded” its group of non-governmental tiger experts to include people from the field in India and experts from all over the world. The two best “tiger guys” in the world are based in USA and our government has nothing to do with them. Can you imagine that?

6. Role of tourism

Indian conservationists and the government does not accept the fact that “tourism is the most powerful conservation tool that they have.” It is a well known fact that in protected areas that are surrounded by high human population density (and most Tiger reserves in India are) tourism is probably the only savior for wildlife. The Forest Department and the conservationists in India believe that tourism is a big “disturbance”. Well managed tourism is the biggest conservation tool in the world.

I will give you an example. The worst managed tiger tour reserve in India is Bandhavgarh in Madhya Pradesh. The tourism area is about a 100 square kilometers (much smaller than Ranthambhore) and on an average there are 50 to 75 vehicles in that area. This area also has the highest tiger density any where in the world – almost 5 to 10 times higher than other places. There are about 30 adult tigers and almost 15 to 20 cubs right now in an area of 100 square kilometers. The numbers are growing every year, while tigers all over Madhya Pradesh are getting decimated.

Wildlife tourism has to be used as a conservation tool in India. We have no choice on this front.

For a long term tiger crisis solution in India we have to address the above issues. I just hope the Prime Minister is listening.

Cheers,
Aditya Singh

PS: I am putting your mail and my reply on my weblog. Check out www.ranthambhore.blogspot.com soon

–
The Ranthambhore Bagh
Ranthambhore Road
Sawai Madhopur 322001
India

—— Forwarded Message
From: ROY FALLON
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2007 17:45:24 +0100 (BST)
To: Aditya Singh
Subject: Contact

Hi Aditya

Just contacting you to see how things are going. Lots of good discussion on the Wildlife India forum the last few days. I have replied to a few of them myself.

Looking at the tiger situation from the outside, as I am, it seems difficult to understand why the authorities in India cannot get to grips with the situation. They seem to know exactly who and where the poachers are at almost any one time, yet nothing gets done that is of any significance.

The government seems to leave the problem to the local authorities to sort it out, but I cannot imagine anything getting done in that way. The locals are too dissorganised and too easy to corrupt. The poachers dont stay in one area, they cross borders and seem to just laugh in the face of the law.

I think it requires a national force to be set up, like the U.S.A.’s National Guard and their F.B.I. to harrass and chase these poachers until they can hardly draw breath.

They seem to be left to do exactly as they please and even if they are caught they are released and the penalties are paltry.

When India, loses its tigers, and I am convinced it will, it will be an unimaginable disaster for the whole country. Worse than any earthquake.

The Madhya Pradesh tourist authority has stated that more than 80% of India’s tourism is nature driven and that 75% of it is tiger tourism. They have said that the imbalance of tiger tourism is actually causing problems because certain areas are getting worn out due to the demand to see tigers, whilst others are getting less tourism than desired. Well let the tigers spread themselves out and that will be solved. Open up the corridors between the forests and the tigers will work out where they need to be.

The thing is, most of India’s tourism budget is generated by tiger watchers. That is a massive amount of money coming into the country. When the tiger has gone, people will start going elsewhere. If you take the whole population of India, I am sure that the poachers would hardly show up as a number on a graph, but these greedy and ruthless few are depriving the whole nation of its pride and heritage.

Not just the nation of India but the whole World.

African governments saw this coming a long time ago and did something about it. They made poachers public enemy number one, with the exception of that lunatic in Zimbabwe and the puppets in Uganda and the Gambia.

A lot of people will still go to India to see the Taj Mahal and the Golden Temple at Amritsar etc. but they will just do a round trip of all these and similar places and that will be the end of their interest in the country. The Taj Mahal, I am sure, is a wonderful and beautiful building, but at the end of the day, thats all it is… a building… made by men. The tiger is a gift from the Gods, whichever God(s) exist. Once people have travelled to see the amazing monuments, forts and palaces of India they have seen them and there is nothing more to see about them. But when they see a tiger, walking in the forest, it is an emotional experience that they will want to repeat over and over again.

I sincerely believe that to save the tiger from extinction is to save and preserve all the creatures and the forest environment.

The balance has to exist, the tiger feeds on the herbivores and the herbivores feed on the forest, if the tiger dissappears the lesser carnivores multiply and get out of control, they then ravage the forest of its prey stock, then they enter the villages and farms and take the domestic livestock.

This has been proven in Australia, of all places, where a whole colony of dingoes were exterminated as pests. The dingoes were the apex predators in the area and when they were gone the lesser predators bred like wildfire and decimated the other wildlife of the area, and of course, they then turned to domestic stock….man’s management or man’s interference?

Even the smallest and most insignificant ecosystems that you can think of fall apart in the same way.

A local farmer here in my town, built himself a huge house on, green belt land (land not to be built on). He built a load of stables and a dog boarding kennels. Here in England, those bloody peacocks are seen as a bit of a status symbol. If you are someone who think that you special, you have a load of land round your house and you get yourself a few peacocks to make it look pretty and picturesque. So this farmer got himself 6 peacocks and, as all lazy farmers do, he let them run around his grounds without any protection. So they laid eggs, when the eggs hatched there were baby peacocks running around the grounds.

Guess what???

It may astonish and surprise you, because it did astonish and surprise the farmer, when the local foxes killed all the peacock chicks. So what did this guy, who had introduced an unnatural prey species into the foxes territory, do? He shot all the foxes, of course. He dragged the fox cubs out of their dens and he battered them all to death with a shovel. He proudly acclaimed this feat of bravery to anyone who would listen.He stayed away from me of course, and he still does.

Now, as strange as it may seem, he is complaining about the local wildlife again. Obviously not because his peacock chicks are being eaten, cos there are no predators left to do that. But now he is over run with rabbits, rats and hedgehogs. The rats and hedgehogs are eating all his peacock and chicken eggs and the rabbits are eating all his horse, dog and peacock foods, the rats are at that stuff as well. So now, he is setting traps for the rest of the wildlfe on “his” land. Of course he calls the rabbits, rats and hedgehogs pests and blames them for his dilemma but any child of 8 could tell him that he is the real pest.

Anyway mate I gotta go now, time to get some dinner, my stomach thinks that my throat has been cut.

Talk soon

Roy Fallon

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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 during this time. They go in for grazing their cattle, stocking up firewood for the winters, collecting forest produce like antlers etc, poaching etc etc. There is zero patrolling and I really mean zero. We joke that the rarest sight in Indian parks is a “Forest Guard patrolling his beat”. But believe me this is not a joke.

On a conservative estimate the amount of people who go into Ranthambhore on monsoons (when the park is shut for tourists) is ten times more than the amount of tourists who visit the park throughout the year. However, the authority just chooses to ignore people who go to the park in the monsoons and since there is no official record of such offenders, they officially do not exist.

Every year a few tigers disappear in the monsoon months and are never seen again. The official version (when there is one) is that the tigers have migrated. Migrated to where? This story is probably true for all parks in India, with the exception of Kaziranga - where they shoot first and ask later.

When I moved to Ranthambhore, about 10 years ago, there were over 30 tigers. How am I so sure? Well there was a family in the lake area - a tigress with 3 full grown cubs. There were four other families with three to four cubs each in Kachida, Chiroli, Lahpur and Thumka. There were 4 big males and a few sub adult males and at least 5 tigresses without cubs.

Since then I have seen over 60 cubs grow up to maturity and separate from their mother and then disappear to be never seen again. They just disappear , sorry “migrate” and are never seen again. A noted poacher had told me once that sub adult tigers are the best ones to “milk” - they are nearly full grown (perfect skin size) and no one notices their disappearance. Believe me, when I say that professional poachers actually “milk” tigers for their skin and bones. They never wipe out the entire lot. They really messed up in Sariska - where they ate the chicken instead of the eggs every day.

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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 activism. They started getting in touch with the local and national media and started highlighting the plight of Ranthambhore in the media. The disappearance of tigers from Sariska Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan was still fresh news and the media really took the Rajasthan Forest department apart. I had no role to play in all of this, though many people in the Rajasthan Forest Department still believe that I was instrumental in spreading “ false stories” about Ranthambhore in the media. Some of them along with the local police and administration were gunning for us but they did not get their chance till almost a year later.

The media lapped up all the news about Ranthambhore and published them after “spicing” them up a bit. The Rajasthan Forest Department had to bear the brunt of the media onslaught. The international media picked some of this news up and that added to the fire.

Tiger Watch put together a small project for gathering information on poaching around Ranthambhore and started looking for funding for the project. About a month later they got the funds though Fateh Singh’s son’s Non Governmental Agency and they started collecting information from around Ranthambhore.

In the first week of February I left for Bharatpur (Keola Deo Ghana Bird Sanctuary) for a week. By that time I was getting pretty fed up with all the politics that went with tiger conservation.

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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 morning. On the 30th of January all of us slept and later in the night we celebrated. As a result, there were no raids on the 30th.

On the 31st January, the Deputy Field Director (Mr. G.S. Bhardwaj) decided to accompany us on a raid in the Khandar fort area that lies in the North-east end of the Ranthambore National Park. We left around 10:00 in the morning – not the best time to go for a raid – in a convoy of two Forest Department jeeps and one truck. There were about 40 people. We first went to small village about 10 kilometers short of Khandar – where a few families of “Bagariya” tribals live. The Bagariyas, like the Mogiyas, are a former hunter-gatherer tribe, who now kill animals mainly for bush meat. They are not as lethal as the Mogiyas but are no friends of wild animals. We searched about 10 odd huts that were there in the settlement but did not find anything substantial. We did find a small cooking pot with some wild boar meat but since we could not ascertain, who the pot belonged to, we could not take any action. A large crowd had gathered around and the word had spread that the Forest department officials were on the prowl looking for poachers.

Around noon we went to a small village called Bhaopura on the banks of river Banas towards the North of the Ranthambhore National Park. On the outskirts of the village, on top of a small hillock was a small hut that we were told belonged to a Mogiya. There was no way a jeep could have reached even close to the hut, so we had to walk the last half kilometers or so. By the time we reached the hut, all the men had disappeared and there were only two small kids and one old woman. We asked the women if she had heard of any hunting in the area and she swore that they were law abiding citizens and that there was no hunting at all in the area. We still searched the area around the hut and after about 15 minutes found a small plastic bag that contained two nails of Sloth Bear and some black coloured hair that we believed came off a bear (see pictures below). The woman was arrested and taken to the Forest Office in Khandar. By that time it was getting close to sunset and we headed back.

The next day we went to the Deputy Field Director’s office and he informed us that the Operation Co-operation was off because the officials of the “Flying Squad” (which is in-charge of all anti-poaching operations) were getting “demoralized.” That was the end of it – at least for us. For the next two weeks or so the Forest Department did carry out a series of raids, which did not result in any arrests. Mainly because the word was out that a lot of raids would happen in the next few days and most of the poachers had just disappeared.

Did the Operation-cooperation achieve anything worthwhile? It did though indirectly. The Operation did not arrest many people but it did scare the poachers who had no choice but to disappear. Many months later, we asked a poacher (Devi Singh – who was one of the king pins) when poaching actually stopped. He told us that most of the poachers left the area around Ranthambore after the “series of raids that were conducted in the end of January.” In that sense the Operation Co-oeration and the series of raids that followed were the main reason for the end of large scale poaching around Ranthambhore that started in the beginning of 2003.

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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 – in the morning and gave him the information. He gave us the go ahead for conducting a raid on this Mogiyas area and asked us to go along with the Range Officer (Project Tiger) and some forest guards. We were supposed to meet the officer in the Raj Bagh Forest Check post at sunset.

In the evening 5 of us – Dharmendra Khandal (Field Biologist), Vakil Mohammed (Safari jeep owner and driver), Rafiq (Nature Guide), Lokesh (a hawker who make a living selling T-shirts to tourists) and I – left for the Raj Bagh check post. The Range Officer along with a driver and a forest guard was waiting for us. He wanted to take us for “patrolling” along the main highway to Madhya Pradesh (the central Indian state that borders Ranthambhore). We told him our plan about trying to bust Rajmal Mogiya. He was not at all keen on any raid and tried to convince us that such raids can be very “risky” in the night and that there were too few of us to execute it. That did not make sense to us because we thought that 8 people (5 of us and three forest officials, including the ranger, who was armed) were more than enough to catch one man who would be in a hut in an agricultural field, way outside the village. After a lot of arguments (which I would not even like to mention) he agreed to come along but insisted that neither he nor any of the forest official would carry out the actual raid. They said that they would take us to the location where we thought Rajmal would be and they would wait near that location, while the 5 of us carried out the actual raid. In case they thought that the raid would get out of hand they would leave. That was acceptable to us and we left.

We reached Bhairopura at midnight and soon located Rajmal’s beaten up motorcycle parked at the edge of an agricultural field. The ranger’s jeep dropped us close to where the motor-cycle was parked and we went inside the fenced field while the forest officials waited in the jeep. We found Rajmal sleeping on a wooden cot. There were a few empty bottles of “moonshine” alcohol near the bed and one cooking pot. Rajmal was obviously knocked out drunk. We checked the cooking pot and found a lot of blood and some meat sticking to the base of the pot. We also found a wooden log that was covered with blood and it appeared as if someone had slaughtered an animal on top of this log. That was all we needed to be con-vinced that Rajmal had killed some wild animal recently. We surrounded Rajmal’s cot and shook him awake. As soon as he got up he started shouting and tried to run. We pinned him down but he continued to shout as if he was trying to warn someone else. There was a lot of shouting and I don’t clearly remember the sequence of events that followed for the next 15 minutes or so. I remember the Forest jeep driving up to the edge of the field, a lot of pushing and shoving between Rajmal and three of us. Suddenly another man (who was probably sleeping in another cot close by) got up and started running. Lokesh and Dharmendra ran after him and caught him after a brief chase. By that time the ranger was screaming at us to get out of there. We put the two people that we had caught inside the jeep and got out of there. We drove straight to the Falodi Range Office.

In the Falodi Range Office – the Falodi Range Officer – Mr. Kala, a burly Sikh officer – started interrogating Rajmal and the other person. After a lot of very patient cross question-ing, Rajmal admitted that he had killed a porcupine. We did not believe him because the amount of blood that we had seen could not have come out of a small animal like the porcu-pine. That’s when Mr. Kala decided that we should go back to the location where we had caught Rajmal and search the entire place with a toothcomb. It was almost four in the morn-ing by the time we reached the filed and all of us were very excited. After searching the field for an hour we found two gunnysacks full of Sambar deer (Cervus unicolor - see picture below) meat. The deer had been cut up into large sized pieces and stuffed in the sack. Soon we found a loaded gun (a muzzle loader) and a lot of gunpowder. Rajmal was busted – fair and square – and he ad-mitted that he had killed the sambar the night before and that he had sold half the meat. He also told us that the other person that we had caught was also involved in the sale.

We got together all the evidence and took both the persons that we had caught to the Forest Department’s head quarters in the Sawai Madhopur town. The Deputy Field Director (Mr. Bhardwaj) and a lot of other forest officials were waiting for us. Mr. Kala had informed them about the raid. It took another few hours to get the entire paperwork (for their prosecution) done and by the time we were finished it was almost noon. We were exhausted but did not feel it because of the excitement. All of us were on top of the world and felt that we had done our bit to help save Ranthambhore’s wildlife.

It felt good.

Top: Rajmal’s wife and one of his three daughter-in-laws, a few days after Rajmal Mogiya was arrested by us for killing a Sambar deer. At that time we did not know that he was involved in killing of tigers. A few months later we came to know that between 2003 and 2004 he was involved in the poaching of over 6 tigers in and around Ranthambhore.

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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 wanted to highlight were mainly Habitat destruction that was going on around the tiger reserve and the “missing tigers” of Ranthambore. At that point in time, we knew that many tigers of Ranthambhore were missing but we were not sure what had happened to them and how did they go missing. We were not even sure how many tigers were missing. Tiger watch claimed that there were 18 tigers missing but I do not think that even they were sure about it. I did know for a fact that we could easily identify 24 dif-ferent tigers, when we were working on a film project (which came to an end in May 2002) for BBC. By the early 2005, only 6 of these 24 were still around. That makes it “at least”18 and not just 18.

Bittu Sahgal, the editor of “Sanctuary magazine” – India’s only wild life magazine – was in Ranthambore in the third week of January. After meeting the Deputy Field Director, he asked us to go meet him and work with him. We – Dharmendra Khandal and I – went to meet Mr. Bhardwaj (the Deputy Field Director) on the 26th of January 2005. After a long discussion, which got pretty heated at times, Mr. Bhardwaj decided to initiate intensive pa-trolling by the Forest Department officials and volunteers like us. He decided to call this “Operation Co-operation.”

On the 27th January we headed out after sunset for our first job. There 5 volunteers – Dharmendra Khandal (a Field Biologist), Ashlesh Sharma and Hemraj Meena (both are nature guides that take tourists to the park), Vakil Mohammed (a tourist safari jeep owner-driver) and I. We were to meet 3 forest guards in the Bodal chowki and work as per their instruc-tions. The guards told us that we were to go to a point on the Mansarovar Road (Mansarovar is a large lake at the edge of the park) and set up a road-block there to “look for suspected poacher.” We did not think that this was a great idea but we went along with them anyways. Why did we think that this was not a good idea? Because setting up a road-block to nab poachers is a bit like throwing a baited fishing line in the Loch Ness and hoping that the monster will grab it. If the poachers were so stupid then most of them would have been caught by now. We did set up a road-block but soon got bored of hanging around there. Va-kil was the first one out of us to express that he had come out to catch poachers and not for conducting a traffic survey. He had some information about a suspected poacher (I would not name him because he is still at large) coming to small village near Khandar (a small town on the northeast edge of the park – from where Vakil hails). We decided to go there and try to nab him. One of three guards decided to accompany us while the other two de-cided to stay at the road-block and off we went to Khandar in my brand new jeep.

Only when we reached the outskirts of the village did we realize what we were getting into. Half the male population of the village had a criminal record and if they ever realized that we had no back up they would have beaten the living day lights out of us. We decided to pretend that we were some special police and had a lot of back up. Most of us wear military jackets etc so we could pass of as some special police group. We parked the jeep a slight distance away from the village and entered the village. We did not find the guy we had come for but we did find his grown up son who was just beginning to cook a few partridges (game birds that are protected by the Indian law). We grabbed the guy and whatever evidence we could gather fast – like the cooking pot with the meat in it, a knife and an axe that were covered with blood, some turtle shells etc – and tried to take the guy to the jeep. That’s when the entire village (about a dozen houses) came out of their houses and surrounded us. There was a lot of screaming and shouting and we were playing the part of special police force so well that all of them still think that they were raided by a special force. The villagers stayed with us all the way to the jeep but neither tried to stop us nor did they try to touch us. They just kept staring at us. We got the guy we had caught inside the jeep and got out of there fast. We took this guy to the Khandar range of the Ranthambore national park and handed him over to the Range officer with whatever evidence that we had gathered – which was enough to put him behind bars for a few months. That was the end of our operation and we headed home. The next day we learnt that the Range Officer had discarded the turtle shells as evidence ( and legally they would have been the most incriminating). As a result the case was very weak and the guy got bail from the courts immediately. So much for our first raid to save Ranthambhore.

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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 tiger crisis. Bengal tigers of India do owe a lot to the Indian Express.

For the last few months there were very strong and persistent rumours that there were no tigers left in Sariska. The last tiger that was seen alive by visitors was before July. There were reports of some people seeing a tiger in November and they were probably true but since they have not produced a photograph as yet, most people do not believe the reports. In November 2004 a friend of mine had met a researcher from Wildlife Institute of India, who was doing Field work in Sariska. He had told my friend that his entire team had not seen any evidence of presence of tigers in Sariska, for the last four months.

I met Jay Mazumdar, the Indian Express reporter, who first broke the Sariska disaster story in the beginning of February 2005, when he had come to Ranthambore national park. He had a very interesting story to tell us about his Sariska adventure. Jay, is a great guy who is very fond of visiting wilderness areas. He was a regular visitor to Sariska, which is barely 4 hours drive from his house. He told us that during his last three visits to Sariska he did not see any evidence of a tiger. His naturalist and driver in Sariska used to promise him that they would definitely “show him a tiger when he returns for his next visit.” When he went to Sariska in the end of December 2004, the naturalist told him that he personally had not seen a tiger for over 7 months. That got Jay’s journalist instincts rocking. He did some more re-search and found out that no one had seen a tiger for over 6 months – forget seeing a tiger, they had not even seen pugmarks of tigers. Later he went and interviewed the District Forest Officer or DFO – Mr. R.S. Shekhawat (who is now the Deputy Field Director of Rantham-bore national park) – an honest, upright and hard working officer. The DFO told Jay that he had been posted in Sariska in the month of August 2004 and he had not seen any evidence of the presence of tigers since he had been posted there. Jay came back from his trip and started working on the biggest wildlife related news of the decade for India. He admitted that he was initially hesitant about proclaiming, that “there were no tigers left in Sariska.”

One of the very few times that I have seen a Striped Hyena in the daylight was this one in Sariska tiger reserve

Anyways in the third week of January the Indian Express headlines screamed “There are no tigers in Sariska” and all hell broke loose. All the “arm chair” conservationists of India sud-denly woke up from their deep slumber. The Project Tiger and the Forest Department of Ra-jasthan state went in a “total denial” mode. They came out with statements like “the tigers have temporarily migrated to the neighbouring state (a state which does not have any for-ests)”, “they are hiding and will soon be back” and so on. However, by the end of February, even they declared that as far as tigers were concerned, Sariska was dead. The end of a Pro-ject Tiger reserve.

Soon, the poachers started getting arrested and that is when the magnitude of the problem hit all of us. India, unofficially declared the Third tiger crisis, even though the officials were denying that there was any crisis. The Rajasthan state government ordered an enquiry and sacked a very senior officer of the Forest department.

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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 population of tigers that were not in the Project Tiger reserves did decline dramatically.

By the early 2003 news gradually started filtering from different high profile reserves that the organised professional poachers are back in action. Such “rumors” were routinely being heard in Panna, Ranthambhore, Bandhavgarh, Kanha, Sariska and many other National Parks. The Forest authorities and the Project Tiger Directorate dismissed these as “mere rumors with no scientific basis” but the “rumors” continued. There were, as yet unverified reports from visitors to Tibet, that fresh skins of tigers and leopards are being openly sold and worn by people.

10 tigers that went “missing” in Ranthambore between 2003 and 2005

Environmental Investigation Agency’s Tibet survey
In 2003, a United Kingdom based Non Governmental Organisation - the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) undertook an under cover survey of Tibet and found that the rumors were indeed true. Their report stated the following:
The demand for tiger skins and bones has been going up for the last decade or so. The skins mostly go to Tibet through Nepal, while the bones and other parts go to China and East Asia. (The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) of UK has some excellent documentation of the trade in tiger parts). In the last 2-3 years, as a lot of Tibeteans started getting richer the demand for Tiger and Leopard skins went through the ceiling. To quote from the EIA website: “Travellers to Tibet in 1995 documented the use of tiger and leopard skins to decorate costumes known as chubas, mostly among the Khampa people from eastern Tibet. Historically however, the wearing of skins was restricted to victorious war commanders, rewarded with a patch of skin by the great Kings of Tibet; it is not traditional for every day Tibetans to wear tiger and leopard skin. It was never traditional to wear the entire skin or great swathes of skin. Tragically, anyone with the affluence is able to wear this illegal product”

One of the missing tiger of Ranthambhore that went missing between 2003 and 2005

In 2004 an Indian NGO - the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI) - in collboration with the EIA undertook another undercover survey of Tibet and unearthed even more shocking details about the trade in tiger skin. To quote their website:
“Dramatic new findings released today from investigations in China and the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) reveal the previously unknown scale of the trade in tiger and leopard skins. Skins are being openly traded in China and TAR on a scale that triggers real fear over the future of the wild tiger. The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), who first pioneered undercover investigation into crimes against wildlife and the environment 21 years ago, and the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI) have just returned from investigations conducted in August this year. EIA and WPSI have obtained footage revealing the staggering size of the market for tiger and leopard skins - much of which is being used for costumes and ceremonial events. Investigators attended horse festivals across the Tibetan plateau where many people, including the organisers and officials, were wearing costumes decorated with tiger and leopard skins, known locally as chubas. The costumes had been bought within the last two years and the traders categorically stated that the tiger skins had come from India. Since EIA’s visit last year, there has been a massive increase in the availability of tiger and leopard skins in Lhasa, TAR. In the 46 shops surveyed, 54 leopard skin chubas and 24 tiger skin chubas were openly displayed, 7 whole fresh leopard skins were presented for sale and, within the space of 24 hours, investigators were offered three whole, fresh tiger skins. In one street alone in Linxia, China, more than 60 whole snow leopard and over 160 fresh leopard skins were openly on display - with many more skins rolled up in the back. The investigators also found over 1,800 otter skins, which are also used to decorate costumes. The quantity and blatant display of tiger and leopard skins in TAR and China demonstrates a lack of awareness among consumers about the plight of the tiger, and the urgent need for targeted enforcement to stop traders from smuggling and illegally selling the skins of tigers and leopards.”

These are the findings of a survey which was carried out in August 2005 by a UK- based NGO, the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), and the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI). It confirms earlier reports - notably in October 2003 when China’s Anti-Smuggling Bureau seized a truck in the Tibet Autonomous Region containing 31 tiger, 581 leopard and 778 otter skins from India. In an earlier survey in May 2004, the EIA found whole fresh leopard skins for sale in Lhasa:-

“In August, we found that the open sale and use of fresh tiger, leopard and otter skins is now even more widespread. All the dealers that we talked to said the skins had come from India, and most of the Tibetans wearing them said that they had purchased the skins in the past 18 months. The skin chubas are only worn twice a year, at local horse festivals - where we witnessed dancers, horse riders, visitors, and even organisers and officials, wearing skins - and at the Tibetan New Year.”

One of the missing tigers of Ranthambhore that went missing between 2003 and 2005

Despite all the evidence the evidence, the Forest Department in India and the Project Tiger Directorate, instead of declaring a crisis and taking urgent steps, kept on denying that there any problem with tigers in India. They claimed that the skins that were being routinely seen in Tibet were not from India.

Sariska Tiger Reserve

From the summers of 2004 there were strong and persistent reports - mainly from the people involved in tourism - that no tigers were being sighted in Sariska Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan. It was not only that tigers were not being seen but also and more alarmingly, there were no indirect evidence of tiger’s presence (such as pugmarks, scratch marks on trees etc) being found. The Rajasthan Forest Department took the stand that “the tigers had temporarily migrated outside the reserve and would be back after the rains.” The Project Tiger backed this assumption. In January, a leading English national Daily broke the news that there were no tigers left in Sariska. Thus broke open the Third Tiger Crisis. Soon the Rajasthan Forest Department and the Project Tiger Directorate declared an “emergency tiger census” in Sariska. After a two month exercise they finally declared the bad news that Sariska indeed did not have any tigers left.

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