PANJIM: After a historic judgment by the Bench of Justices Mahesh Sonak and B P Deshpande directing the Goa government to constitute a tiger reserve in Mhadei in three months, the counsel for the petitioner Norma Alvares said that the State Wildlife Board was never against the constitution of the tiger reserve.
“In 2016, the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) went to the State Board. Did the state board say no? The state board neither said yes nor said no. They said that please send us the proposal of the Tiger Reserve for approval before it is sent to NTCA. Which means the State Board was in favour of Tiger Reserve,” she said.
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In 2018, the forest department prepared the final plan and the note and sent it to the State Board. When the then Chairperson of the board said that it is necessary to do the study on what will be the impact on the people residing in this area and that was the last of it.
“It simply came to a grinding halt and never came up again. This is what led the Goa foundation to file the petition saying that this is the state of affairs, four tigers died, therefore we filed the petition,” Alvares informed.
Adv Alvares explained the circumstances that led to the filing of Tiger Reserve public interest litigation at on Point Counter Point on Herald TV. In January 2024, tigers were killed and poisoned by villagers due to cattle loss and this made headlines. “We were as taken aback at Goa foundation as the citizens of Goa, that four tigers killed overnight body after body being discovered. And the villagers were held responsible for these deaths. The fact remains that there must have been something which upset the villagers so much that they poisoned the Tigers if at all they did” she said. “I have lived in Sattari village for almost five years and we know and we have seen that people were very much attuned to nature. They don’t hate the Tigers. They don’t hate wild animals they live with them. They are aware of the animals that live in their surroundings. What would lead to people killing such a majestic creature as a tiger when they’re not going to eat the meat? They are not killing it for food” Adv Alvares added.
Obviously, she said, it was a loss of cattle which was a pain for them, economically crippling, and the fact that the villagers told the NTCA who visited the area to make a report on it.
“They said in the previous times when the Tigers had killed the cattle they never got compensation from the government and it is one of the remarks that NTCA has mentioned in its report,” she said.
The procedure for getting compensation is so long and so tedious and one has to trudge from office to office, that you just bemoan, the death of your cattle by the tiger and in that anger you poison whatever destroyed your food. Therefore I don’t have any enmity and I do not condemn the villagers at all for what they did. I blame the government for not compensating people and going to their rescue when they need help,”
