Intelligence report questions radio collaring for Tiger

New Delhi: A wildlife intelligence report has blamed tiger deaths in Panna Tiger Reserve on their "radio collaring", raising questions over the projects to conserve the animal throughout the country. The report, submitted to Union Environment and Forests Minister Jairam Ramesh, has said that the radio collaring of Tigers in Madhya Pradesh`s Panna Tiger Reserve has "compromised the overall security of the reserve". "The report has found that around 80 percent of the Tigers killed in Panna have met their deadly fate at the hands of poachers after they were radio collared," top sources in the Ministry said. Terming its findings as "interesting", the report said the "radio collar technique has been identified in most number of cases" of tiger deaths that the team probed. The report, submitted to the ministry with annexures running into few pages dealt with the "security" reasons of sudden disappearance of Tigers from the Panna reserve. The document which talks on the "technical and security issues" of the Panna reserve has said the radio collar has restricted the movement of the animal for hunting its prey and its free movement in the wild. "The radio-collar has also resulted in infections on the neck of the tiger which becomes fatal for the animal," the sources said. The report has put a question mark on the procedure of radio collar techniques in the reserve. "The investigating team found out that no Standard Operating Procedures (SOP`s) for radio-collaring were taken into consideration and hence, the tiger struggled his way to death", sources said. There are possibilities to suggest that poachers may have also brought radio frequency catching devices to first locate the tiger and subsequently poach it, they added. The radio-collar technique has been used across the country to understand animal behaviour and keep a check on the population and receive incidents of poaching for rare and highly conserved animals such as the tiger. The radio-collaring of tigers in Panna was started in 1998 and the wild cats are first shot with tranquilisers to tag the collars. There were about 27 Tigers in the reserve till 2007 but a recent survey by Wildlife Institute of India in May this year had revealed that the reserve had no tiger left. Bureau Report