The Goa government’s attempt to prove to the Central Empowered Committee (CEC) – constituted by the Supreme Court of India – that over one lakh people would need to be displaced if the Tiger Reserve is declared, has been exposed in its own submission.
As per the submission, the government stated, “It has already received claims exceeding 100,000 (one lakh) in numbers for settlement,” while also mentioning that there are 1,274 households in the protected areas (PA) of Goa, thus leaving its admissions open to speculation.
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On Page 53 of Annexure – C under the title “Details of Villages /Hamlets and households in the Protected areas of Goa,” the submission states there are 612 households in Mhadei Wildlife Sanctuary, 571 households in Bhagwan Mahaveer Wildlife Sanctuary, 41 households in Cotigao Wildlife Sanctuary, and 50 households in Netravali Wildlife Sanctuary — a total of 1,274 households in the PAs.
“If one generously assumes a family of five persons in each household, it would roughly amount to 5,000 to 6,000 people in the 33 village hamlets and not the over one lakh the government’s own submission claims,” stated Claude Alvares, Director of Goa Foundation, the NGO leading the effort to have the Tiger Reserve declared.
In its 74-page submission to the two members of the CEC, apart from the anomaly in the numbers of people to be translocated, the government tried to convince the CEC members that the All India Tiger Estimate (AITE) of 2022, which recorded the presence of five tigers in Goa, is misplaced.
The submission states that according to systematic camera trapping carried out for the first time by the Forest Department as part of the AITE exercise, two adult individuals (no cubs or young tigers) were photo captured only in Mhadei Wildlife Sanctuary and Bhagwan Mahaveer (Mollem) National Park and none in Cotigao Wildlife Sanctuary and Netravali Wildlife Sanctuary.
Renowned Goan environmentalist Rajendra Kerkar scoffed at the government submission, stating that it was “Prime Minister Narendra Modi who claimed, whilst declaring the 2022 Tiger census, that there were five tigers in Goa.”
The contention of the BJP government in Goa of there being four tigers is against the declared statement of the Prime Minister that the 2022 Tiger Census found five tigers in Goa.
Another contention is that “there is no definitive evidence on record to ascertain whether the individual tigers observed in Mhadei and Mollem are resident tigers or transient visitors.”
“It is reasonable to infer that these regions function primarily as areas linking tiger reserves rather than core habitat for tigers,” reads the submission, which is not accepted by noted tiger expert Dr Ullas Karanth.
Dr Karanth’s note presented to the CEC read, “Our work in Goa was part of a longer-term study of the entire meta population of tigers (and prey as well as leopards) in the 230,000 sq km Malenad landscape in Karnataka that abuts the PAs of Goa at the northern end, and Wayanad and Mudumalai WLS, respectively in Kerala and Tamil Nadu at the southern end.”
“This is one of the largest meta populations of tigers in the world, and the PAs in Goa are very important for this tiger meta population because they buffer it on the western side from human impacts and provide connectivity to other fragmented tiger populations further north in the Western Ghats that are barely intact at this point in time, even after fifty years of tiger-focused conservation in India.”
