It’s official. There are no tigers left in Madhya Pradesh’s Panna tiger reserve.

Rampant poaching and total “denial for the past eight years” have led to the extinction of tigers there, a Central investigation has revealed.

The state government denied any crisis even as tigers were regularly being poached for eight years between 2002 and 2009, an extensive report prepared by a Special Investigative Team (SIT) set up by the Ministry of Environment and Forests has found.

The SIT was constituted to investigate the extinction of tigers from Panna this year, which till 2007 held at least 24 tigers.

“The tiger population has shown decline with no ecological reasons, supporting the notion that poaching was a major cause of local tiger extinction in Panna,” says the report. “It cannot be compared with Sariska (where tigers went extinct in 2005) because warning bells were sounded regularly for the last eight years.”

A string of warnings, given by the Ministry of Environment and Forests, the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), independent scientists and NGOs were ignored between 2002 and 2008 as Madhya Pradesh concentrated on ‘tourism and welfare’ and senior officials looked the other way, says the report.

“The team felt that Panna was a very special case because the management received so many cautions and warning letters from different agencies. It has been observed by the team that Government of Madhya Pradesh was always in a denial mode that there was crisis in Panna,” the report says.

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