On Saturday, May 15, a man returning from a wedding through the jungles near the village of Kerim in South Goa got the shock of his life when a tigress and her cub calmly stepped on to the road around 50 metres in front of his motorbike and crossed the road at a leisurely pace. The man, who did not want to be named, alerted the forest officials about the presence of the big cats.
With the actual sighting of the tigers, there is now proof beyond doubt that the big cats do exist in the jungles shared by Goa and Karnataka, a fact that was corroborated when a forest official, Mr Subhash Henrick, found pugmarks of a tigeress near the Anjunem dam area, roughly 60 km from Panaji. Pugmarks and tiger scat was also reported during the recently-concluded tiger census.
Despite hard evidences pointing to the presence of at least three tigers in Goa, the authorities have done nothing about declaring the area as a tiger reserve, something that green activists have been crying themselves hoarse about. The situation is so grim that no forest official is willing to come on record that the pug marks were seen or that the tigers were actually sighted. “If the area becomes a tiger reserves, how will they continue with their illegal mining?” asked Mr Sadashiv Gaonkar, an environmental activist from Ponda, South Goa. Noted activist Mr Rajender Kerkar says that if the Mhadei, Cotigao, Netraveli and Bhagwan Mahavir Sanctuaries are declared tiger reserves, all the illegal mining activities in these jungles would have to be stopped.
Mr Kerkar had in April last year exposed a case of tiger poaching in the Mhadei sanctuaries.