Man eaters of Uttarakhand

When she did not return home for hours, the family members along with other villagers started search in the jungle. Blood trails lead them to the partially eaten body of Govindi. Unfortunately, it was too late.

There were some pugmarks around her body. The news spread like a fire in the neighbouring villages. Forest officials and hundreds of villagers rushed to the spot and at first, the pugmarks were assumed to be that of a leopard. However, since the sugarcane and paddy harvest season was round the corner, and fields packed of full grown sugarcane and rice crop, the pugmarks could not be traced for a longer distance. The death of Govindi Devi resulted in frayed tempers in the villagers.

Initially, the forest department took it as a chance encounter but before the situation could have been analyzed, another incident was reported on 12th September 2016 from the adjoining Gorakhpur village. This time the victim was Paramjit Singh. The dead body of young Paramjit was still holding on the sickle which had some Tiger hair signifying that he could give a blow before falling to the Jaws of death.

This killing was however important from the point of view of authorities… This incident made it clear that the accused was actually a tigress and not a leopard. Though, tigress was not reported on the scene, it was only her pugmarks which later became the evidence for the authorities.

The fear had embraced the villages neighboring Dhela range of the Corbett National Park. Agitated villagers had started making things difficult for the authorities. They carried out Protests and Agitations in the entire area.

Soon after the second incident, the forest department geared itself for action. Cage and camera traps were installed, a team of forest guards were deployed in the region and members of Rai Sikh community (trained in tracing blue bulls and other animals) were also included in the operation. Trained elephants from Corbett started patrolling the area… but the killer remained an enigma, and seemed unruffled by the developments.

To call tigress a man-eater at that moment would have been nothing, but a claim made in haste. Time went by as days turned into weeks but the forest department could only locate her Pugmarks. All maneuver to corner her failed miserably. Moreover, the full grown sugarcane and paddy crop/fields giving full camaflouge were making things much more difficult for the authorities.

In the meantime, the tigress made her third move on September 26. The victim was SumanNegi of Sewalkhaliya village. She was badly injured but fortunately,

still alive. The entire village plummeted into panic right after this tragic episode. The forest department's inability to tackle the menace made the villagers livid with anger and forced the authorities to issue a death warrant.

On the evening of September 27, I received a call from a friend and former warden of Corbett National Park, Mr Upadhayay. As soon as he informed me about the warrant that had been issued, I realized the urgency of the situation and rushed to the spot along with my cameraman Shahnawaz and friend AnkurAjmera. Upadhyay was waiting at the junction road at karanpur, some 5 kilometers from Ramnagar. I immediately moved to study and understand the area. A man eating tigress to be operating within just 8 sq kms of agriculture field for almost a month was an unprecedented and a very strange phenomenon.

This particular confrontation had indeed turned out to be much of a film sequence wherein helicopters and drones in the air and elephants as well as a team of more than 150 forest guards on the ground for almost month trying to corner the man eater. The tigress too, was smart enough to have fooled all of them. She was posing for the camera traps, enjoying the baits while making a narrow escape from the guns of the official hunters.

Next morning, while I was patrolling the area along with the search team, she crossed the gypsies with a blink of an eye. Before the hunters could have loaded their guns, she faded into the sugarcane fields.

But, there was something else which stopped the hunters from shooting and that was likelyhood of somebody getting an accidental shot in the mob.

The gathering of onlookers seemed to be the biggest challenge for the department. Helicopters and drones did not seem to be the best gadgets to handle a man-eater. I stayed back for two days but was disgusted with the way a man-eater was being handled and decided to return back to Delhi leaving Shahnawaz there to cover the operation.

On the 3oth September when I was midst of a meeting, Shahnawaz called. I just crossed my fingers while hoping that the tigress had been caught but to my dismay, No! The tigress had her best laid plans. Within just four days, she had attacked another women, Bhawani Devi of the same village where she had started her attacks from.

After her last attack on Gauri Patwal of Bhawanipur Village on October 5, she went missing. Gauri was injured and undergoing treatment at a Hospital in Haldwani. No causalities had been reported after this, nor had she been trapped till then. Her last pugmarks were found near DhanakpurGhati, a place just a stone's throw from Corbett Jungle. She was probably moving back from where she had come.

On October 19, the Rai Sikhs which were included in the patrolling team traced the tigress near Gorakhpur village, where she made her second kill. This time they had decided to keep it confidential and waited for the morning. She was shot dead on the morning of 20th October, just hundred meters away from the house of Paramjit, the unfortunate second casualty.

Though calm had returned to the villages of Dhela range however there were many questions unanswered. Nestled amidst the foothills of the Himalayas, is the quaint state of Uttarakhand, embraced by the enchanting beauty of sal and oak, snow clad peaks and lush mountains. The state attracts hundreds and thousands of tourists every year and then there is Corbett National Park, the first to hold the baton of Project Tiger.

This beautiful state has its own set of problems. Besides the jaw dropping locales, there is something rare, something unusual about this beautiful state which many among us are not aware of. Well, the place has a history of producing man-eaters, precisely from the time of Jim Corbett.

Year after year, or rather I say month after month the state makes it to the headlines, and all for the wrong reasons. You may believe it or not, but according to one of the reports, around 400 people have died in some 14,000 villages that exist in proximity of the forests between the year 2000 (when the state of Uttarakhand was formed) and 2015.

Of these 400 people, around 241 were believed to have been killed by leopards. Further, these man-animal encounters have killed 800 leopards, 90 tigers, and 280 elephants during the same very period.

My statement, that the state has history of producing man-eaters, might have made you curious and probably looking for the reason behind it. I am sharing few of the recent incidents which will justify my statement.

Jim Corbett managed to check-mate a wily leopard, but that was 90 years ago. The region is still not free from the menace of man-eating tigers & leopards, or an occasional elephant deciding to go on a rampage. The man-eating tigress which emerged here in 2014 had unleashed the same primal fear amongst masses which had gripped Rudraprayag in the days of Corbett.

The man-eating tigress had appeared unannounced in and around Uttar Pradesh's district of Moradabad and Bijnor last year too. These are the districts on UP-Uttarakhand border. She killed six people in shockingly short span of 16 days.

Her tell-tale pugmarks at the scene of each killing were the only evidence of her presence. The terror which this tigress triggered in Uttar Pradesh is unheard of in recent memory but it too, vanished back into the Corbett.

For us who breathe in the comforts of cities, "man-animal conflict" is nothing more than a phrase which we all have read sometime in some column of a newspaper. But have we never ever realized the bitter realities linked to it?

Man-animal conflict in Uttarakhand has now reached an alarming proportion. Rapid changes in the forest ecosystem, mainly owing to excessive human intervention, climate change, food chain loss as well as occasional territorial fights have been coercing wild animals to stray into human habitations often and this will continue to happen – only locations and circumstances will change.

A bitter truth is, humans are indeed to be blamed. We have ruined jungles to build our homes and with that we have destroyed their natural habitat and prey base. Many people in the affected Uttarakhand region have little idea of India's success in tiger and leopard conservation. And here lies the crowning irony. The very same animals which are priceless to the world are but a monster to them. So who is more skewed in this particular instance, one may ask?