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…

Pratapgarh III

Both Dharmendra and Amit have done their Ph.D. in Botany from Jaipur University, so they were very interested in the flora of southern Rajasthan (that’s where Pratapgarh is). I am not very good with my flora, at least compared to the two of them, so it was a great learning experience for me. I do…

Pratapgarh Part II

The abandoned hut that we were living in was at the base of the Central Hillock, around which most of the kill had taken place. It was not really a hillock, it was more of a low plateau (called dang in Rajasthan). These dangs rise abruptly from flat ground and have sandstone ridges running almost…

Pratapgarh Part I

In the first week of December we left for Pratapgarh, in the Chittor district of Southern Rajasthan. This area has some highly degraded teak forests – most of which have been cut down by the local villagers. These forests hardly have any wildlife left but a few leopards do live in the area. We went…

October to November 2004

On the 1st of October 2004 the park reopened for tourists – the beginning of a new tourist season for Ranthambore national park. I remember the safari on the 1st morning. The park was lush green (it is like that only in the month of October) and all the waterholes were overflowing. I found a…

Monsoons 2004 – July to September

Ranthambhore National Park, like all project Tiger Reserves in India, shuts down for visitors during the monsoons. Since Ranthambhore lies in Rajasthan – the driest Indian state – it only shuts down for three months of monsoons, from July to September. This is the most dangerous time for the big predators. Due to the monsoon…