With the recurring of human-tagger struggles in some forest divisions in the country, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change has nodded funding for a pilot of the ‘Tigers outside the tigers’ scheme to better manage such conflict through increased monitoring and security.
According to official documents, the Executive Committee of National CAMPA (compensatory afforestation funds management and plan authority) under the Ministry of Environment approved funding for the principle on a pilot basis for one year.
Under the scheme, 80 forest divisions in ten states, initially identified on the basis of data of human-tagger conflict, will be given funds. This will be for technical intervention for the safety and monitoring of tigers and co-pre-monitoring, forest managers will be strengthened for addressing the struggle with technology, cooperation with civil society and expert veterinarians to cooperate and hurting base.
The scheme will be applied to the land by the Chief Wildlife Warden of State Forest Departments in close cooperation with NTCA. When asked about the initial role of the pilot, a government official said that NTCA was finalizing the list of forest and wildlife divisions for implementation.
The Executive Committee of the Campa Authority also directed the proposer of the National Tiger Protection Authority (NTCA), the plan to submit the revised year-wise estimates and then get approval from the governing body of the National CAMPA Authority. The proposed outlay of the scheme by 2026-27 is Rs 88 crore and it was initially declared and on March 3 was discussed during the National Board for Wildlife Meeting headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The National CAMPA Authority manages the money collected in the National Compensatory Forestization Fund, in exchange for the turn of forest land for non-forest activities. The fund has also financed in other wildlife projects such as the Great Indian Bustard Recovery Project and Project Cheetah.
Outside the Tiger Reserve, the regional and wildlife divisions are in charge of wildlife conservation. Outside the tiger reserves, about 30 percent of the country’s more than 3,600 tigers, these tigers often hunt cattle and vegetarian people near human settlements, which increases the possibility of interfaces and conflicts with humans. Being a territorial, they also push leopards such as co-east in areas outside the forests, thus combining conflict risk. Official data shows that 382 people were killed in a conflict with tigers between 2020 and 2024, including 111 alone in 2022.
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According to officials, this trend is often seen outside the regional forests near Tadoba Tiger Reserve, Maharashtra in Chandrapur, which has some partitions near Dudhwa and Pilibit in Uttar Pradesh in sugarcane fields, Ranthumbor and Venan in Kerala.
Speaking at the India Conservation Conference at the Wildlife Institute, Dehradun, India on Wednesday, Union Environment Minister Bhupinder Yadav mentioned the scheme and said, “Man-neimal struggle is a big challenge. I was in Dudhwa a few days ago, and there were two types of problems outside the Tiger Reserve, which is a challenge, which is a challenge, which is a challenge, which is a challenge. RanthamBore.
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