Minister of Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh on Tuesday finally confirmed what was first reported by The Indian Express that there are no tigers left in the Panna tiger reserve and that they have been poached. Speaking in the Rajya Sabha, Ramesh said tigers in India were facing various threats, including poaching, insurgency and even “heavy rainfall”. He said cheetahs, which are extinct in India, will have to be brought back to the country.

“In the recent past, tigers have become locally extinct in Sariska and Panna tiger reserves mainly due to poaching. While a CBI investigation was done in the case of Sariska, a Special Investigating Team (SIT) was constituted by the ministry with an independent expert and members drawn from the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WCCB), Wildlife Institute of India (WII) and the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) for investigating the causative factors for tiger extinction in Panna. The SIT recently submitted its report, which has been sent to the state government of Madhya Pradesh for needful administrative and ecological actions,” he said. The Indian Express had first reported that the SIT had found that all tigers in Panna had fallen prey to poaching.

Ramesh said some of the other reserves for big cats had other problems. “The status of tiger is low in some reserves due to ecological factors like heavy rainfall leading to dense forest cover and paucity of natural prey base in Dampa in Mizoram, Namdapha in Arunachal Pradesh and Kallakad-Mundanthurai in Tamil Nadu.”

According to NTCA, heavy rainfall in these areas apparently thwarts the growth of grasslands and thus leads to poor deer and antelope populations.

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