Last Saturday, a tiger, on his usual territorial stroll in Katarniaghat in Terai area of Bahraich district in UP, was besieged by something entirely alien: a train. The tiger was transfixed and taken completely by surprise. And as he stood frozen, the train, running through the Katarniaghat Forest Reserve, dragged the animal along and killed it. An FIR was lodged against railway officials by the Forest Department on charges of negligence.

But it’s not just trains. Tigers are increasingly becoming victims on the state and national highways that wind through and around tiger reserves. It’s the nature of the animal that seems to be working against it. Tigers are fiercely territorial animals and each tiger can have a territory stretching up to 22 km. To guard their territories, tigers routinely patrol their areas, which may spill out of the reserve, and in the process, cross roads and railway tracks. And for all their agility, when faced by light, tigers get transfixed, freezing on the spot. While most tiger reserves have fixed speed limits for trains and vehicles at around 30 km per hour, there is hardly any enforcement. Despite casualties, the issue has neither been tackled at the Central level nor by the local traffic police.

This year, apart from the Katarniaghat accident, one tiger was killed in a road accident in Dudhwa in February. In 2007, a tiger died in a road accident in Terai Central Division, Haldwani. In the same year , another was killed after being hit on a road in Katarniaghat and one more died after being struck by a train near Buxa Tiger Reserve. In December that year, a tiger died outside Corbett when a vehicle hit it. In earlier instances of road accidents, one tiger died in 2003 in Bandipur, another was killed in Bandhavgarh in 2005, and one in Dudhwa in 2006.

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