This could be the road to another tragic Sariska, albeit of elephants, not tigers. In a span of about 45 days across April-May, at least 10 elephants have been confirmed killed at the Simlipal National Park, a tiger reserve in Orissa’s Mayurbhanj district. This is alarming, for it usually takes as long as a year to log that many killings. Some elephants were killed with poisoned arrows; others died from drinking at poisoned salt lakes, dug by poachers. The spurt in poaching is raising concern about the tigers in Simlipal, for security at the park is evidently lax.
The killing of elephants emerged in May, after Sanjukta Basa, an honorary wildlife warden of the district, Bhanu Mitra Acharya, an activist, and a few local groups raised an alarm. Alerted by her contacts, Sanjukta arrived to inspect the park on April 25 but was prevented from doing so by forest officials. It was only after several written appeals to senior officials, and eventually to the chief minister, that she was finally allowed access, on May 11. She claims to have seen evidence of attempts by the park staff to cover up the poaching.
The carcasses had been burnt and the bones were buried deep. “The park officials are scared of what reporting a poaching can do to their careers,” says Sanjukta. “They finished an elephant census in April. How could they have missed these carcasses?” And A.N. Prasad, the director of Project Elephant, says it was voluntary groups that informed him of the killings, not park officials. “An elephant isn’t small that its killing can escape detection,” he says.
After these reports, the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) sent wildlife experts Belinda Wright and Biswajit Mohanty on a fact-finding mission in June. They have submitted their report; it finds basis for the allegations of carcasses being burnt. “I am really fearful about the park’s future. It is under siege and all of us need to work together to restore it to its former glory,” says Wright. It is “especially worrying”, says Mohanty, that these poachings have taken place in a tiger reserve. While poachers in Simlipal have earlier been traced back to as far as Arunachal Pradesh, the park’s observers say locals too have developed the expertise to kill animals as large as elephants. Simlipal, spread across 1,000 sq km, is short of ground staff. A NTCA-appointed committee visited the park in August 2009 and found 101 of the 281 staff positions vacant. Simlipal, not far from the Orissa-West Bengal border, also faces an additional problem—the Maoists. In March and April last year, the rebels repeatedly attacked or damaged the forest department’s range offices and caused a “complete breakdown” of monitoring in the park. Though not directly blaming the Maoists for poaching, NTCA director Rajesh Gopal says,”They needn’t come and poach themselves. The problems they have created in Simlipal allow somebody else to come and poach.”
The local staff fears further attacks, is “demoralised” and needs “professional support”, says Gopal. “We have asked the Centre for a special deployment of about 100 CRPF personnel in the park. That has not happened yet.” The NTCA, meanwhile, has set up a committee headed by the chief wildlife warden of Orissa, and including independent experts and government officials, to oversee and ensure the revival of the park and its protection mechanism. Until that is done, Simlipal’s fate will continue to hang by a thread.
