On Monday Karnataka Forest, Ecology and Environment Minister Eshvar Khandre announced that the tiger and carnivore estimation exercise would be started in all forest areas of the state. The entire operation will be done in the primary tiger reserves in Karnataka such as Kali, Bhadra, Nagarahole, Bandipur and the Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple Tiger Reserve as well as other conservation and reserve forest areas.
In an interview with the journalists, the minister indicated that tiger census is a nationwide exercise carried out periodically after every four years and that the latest survey is the sixth survey of the estimation programme. The last evaluation was conducted in 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022. He observed that Karnataka had always been at the forefront of tiger conservation and in the past was estimated to carry a population of about 563 tigers, which earned them the second highest population of tigers in the country.
The estimation will be done in the patrol areas of 38 forest divisions that will cover all forest ranges in the state. There was a need to have accuracy and uniformity in data collection and in order to achieve this a lot of training was given to frontline forest staffs between October and December. The five tiger reserves were also trained separately with the personnel but staff in all the 13 forest circles also had specialised training.
Minister Khandre says thirty member teams will work three days in forest districts beginning January 5. The daily distance covered by each team will be around five kilometres and field data will be collected on critical field issues like pugmarks, scats, and direct tiger, leopard, other carnivorous and elephant sighting records. This data will be the basis of carnivore estimation stage.
He also mentioned that there will be a second round of the survey between 15 to 17 January in 14 forest divisions.
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