In Uttar Pradesh, they have come to be known as ‘sugarcane tigers’, but the problem is as serious as the nickname is cute. Tigers have been straying from the forests that should be their home and crossing over into thick sugarcane fields. The outcome has already been tragic. Last year, one man-eater which strayed out to Faizabad from Pilibhit, a proposed tiger reserve in UP, has been condemned to death by the Forest Department, another tiger recently also strayed out from the Pilibhit-Dudhwa corridor, killing one person in a sugarcane field . These incidents point towards the poor management of Pilibhit.

The issue here, says the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), is that tigers have become ‘habituated’ to region-specific, man-made habitats — dense sugarcane fields, in this case, which provide refuge to them and may encourage them to stray out of tiger reserves. Currently, as many as three tigers have strayed out from forests and are attacking human beings in UP, a situation that is assuming more and more serious dimensions each day.

NTCA has now decided on providing funding for region-specific landscape management, which will include attempting to change crop patterns from sugarcane to other crops in a defined area around tiger reserves. If such planning had been done earlier, the current situation could have been averted. Pilibhit, which has a resident tiger population, received in-principle approval for becoming a tiger reserve last year. But no Tiger Conservation Plan for the area— a crucial step towards becoming a tiger reserve— has been firmed up by the state yet. Further, Dudhwa, UP’s existing tiger reserve, has not notified its core tiger reserve area, a mandatory action that was declared in 2006 following an Amendment to the Wildlife Protection Act.

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