Sagar Islands: Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee urged the Odisha government to send a Forest department team to rescue a tiger which is moving close to the Bengal border and may sneak into the forest areas of South Bengal if not stopped.
Expressing her disappointment with Odisha’s inability to manage its tigers, she claimed that the tiger is disrupting the lives of people in Bengal’s border districts.
“One tiger recently crossed five forests and terrified people of five districts in Bengal. People couldn’t come out of their homes and schools had to be shut. Our administration and forest officials worked day and night to rescue the tiger. It was tranquilised after nine days. The way it was captured without any injury was a model. Once captured you were in a hurry to take it back,” Banerjee said referring to the recent handover of tigress Zeenat from Bankura that had entered Bengal from Odisha’s Simlipal.
Odisha’s Forest minister Ganesh Ram Singkhuntia on Friday had recently expressed objections to the temporary relocation of tigress Zeenat to Alipore Zoo in Kolkata after she was darted and captured.
Banerjee said: “I will direct the CS (Chief Secretary) to inform the Odisha government to get their tiger back by conducting a rescue operation here so that our people don’t suffer. If they want to send a tiger they can send it permanently. If there is paucity of space, we are ready to accommodate tigers in our forest reserves, deep forests, or rescue centres. They should desist from blame games,” Banerjee said.
She further clarified that the challenges faced during Zeenat’s rescue operation should not be repeated, especially since the Bengal Forest department is already dealing with a high population of elephants in the region. “We have come to know about the movement of a tiger in the Dalma sanctuary of Jharkhand bordering Purulia.
We have taken all precautionary measures to handle the situation if the tiger enters our jurisdiction. We have deployed foresters to increase vigilance along the Jharkhand bordering forest in Purulia,” said S Kulandaivel, chief
conservator of forests.