Panna Tiger Reserve

Panna Tiger Reserve or National Park is an incidental attraction for most tourists, as most land at Khajuraho and make a detour to the park, if they have time. Leave aside one or two hotels and the area around the reserve remains uncluttered, except for the lorry traffic on the highway bisecting Panna and the Gangau sanctuary.

Some time ago, wildlifers thought the Panna Tiger Reserve in the Vindhya mountains was going the Sariska way. A leading tiger expert had alerted the country over the sharp decline in tiger population at Panna. Officials in the forest department of Madhya Pradesh have still not got over the scare and dismiss the work of the expert with disdain.

Dinesh Kothari and myself did not expect to see a tiger at Panna Tiger Reserve when we went on our morning round in a jeep. The Ken river flowing softly through the reserve, defines the forest and is said to be one of the few clean river systems in the country. The Ken keeps the National Park alive. It originates at Bhuwar village near Katni and after running through the southern part of the Panna district, flows along the boundary of Panna and Chhatarpur districts to enter Uttar Pradesh and join the Yamuna.

For a start, we saw four-painted sandgrouse, for the first time, apart from chitals, sambhars and nilgais. On the way, we saw a few tiger pug marks and our guide got a message on his walkie-talkie of a tiger being sighted near the Shivla-Jheria link road. There were two jeeps ahead of us at the spot with the tiger resting deep in the forest. We climbed on an elephant using the top of our jeep as a base and the mahout guided the animal, busy tearing branches from the nearby trees, to the spot where the tiger lay on its side in splendour. We were four on the elephant — two aged foreign ladies, Dinesh and myself — and the five-minute ride was a bit of a roll.

For a minute, the four-year old, male tiger, lifted its head, looked at us before going back to sleep. The tiger did not bother about the 50-year-old she elephant, Anarkali, standing some 10 ft away nor did Anarkali think much of him. Watching the tiger from elephant back (popularly called elephant show) is not the ideal way of watching a tiger. Yet, we were part of the elephant show and at least this writer will not do it again.

At his offices in Panna town, Shahbaz Ahmad, Chief Conservator of Forest and Field Director, Panna Tiger Reserve, said, "the tiger density in the area is good."

An October 2006 study of Wildlife Institute of India says, "We also have conducted camera trapping exercise covering an area of 185 sq km in the Panna National Park. The estimated density of tiger in this area is 4.9 tigers per 100 sq km. Number of tigers in the study area of 185 sq km with a confidence limit of 95 per cent comes to nine (range - minimum eight tigers to a maximum of 15 tigers). Viewed in the context of the all-India situation, this is a reasonably good density and indicates a healthy tiger population in the study area...

"So far as comparability of our studies with the past study done by Karanth (2002) is concerned, it would not be out of place to mention here that their study covered an area of 418 sq km of the Park and estimated a population density of 6.94 tigers per 100 sq km. They estimated a population of 29 tigers over 418 sq km with a range from 10 to 48 tigers. Such wide variance in population estimation is not a very useful tool for monitoring a population. It is also relevant to point out here that our density estimate over 185 sq km has a low CV (coefficient of variation) of 16.8 per cent compared to their high CV of 46.54 per cent. Thus, our estimates are more precise... "

On the way back near the exit gate, we had a chat with the range officer, Madla range, Narendra Singh Parihar, who was happy we had seen a tiger. He said the forest department was on the alert at the Panna Tiger reserve, which has four ranges: Madla, Hinnauta, Panna and Chandranagar. "We are trying our best to stamp out poaching and have built watch towers to oversee 98 per cent of the area," he said.

The Panna Tiger reserve is spread over a core area of 542.67 sq km (no buffer zone) and was at one time the royal hunting grounds of the Maharajas of Panna, Chhatarpur and Bijanor. At present, the Gangau sanctuary nearby is under the management of the Panna Tiger Reserve. Mining activity has completely stopped, including diamond mining, by the National Mineral Development Corporation (NMDC), said Shahbaz Ahmad. "The NMDC has approached the Supreme Court and we are waiting for the final ruling," Ahmad added.

But the Panna-Gangau forests may not remain with New Delhi keen on a dam plus two power stations across the Ken and a railway line lancing the forests to link Khajuraho to Satna. Also, the District Planning Committee is keen on denotifying a portion of the Gangau sanctuary, to probably restart mining and agriculture.

Recently, New Delhi sent a team of officials to drill 35 holes at various points in the Panna National Park as part of the work ahead of setting up the dam. The Field Director objected as any work inside the sanctuary needs the okay of the Supreme Court and the team went back. The Ken-Betwa river link proposes to divert surplus waters of the River Ken at Daudhan (2.5 km upstream of existing Gangau weir) through a Ken-Betwa link canal to River Betwa for meeting the water requirements in the water deficit Betwa basin.

A dam is to come up at Daudhan on the Ken river with a gross storage capacity of 2,775 million cubic metres; a two-km long tunnel followed by an about 230 km long link canal will transfer water from the Ken; two power houses, one (3x20 MW) at the foot of the dam and the other (2x6 MW) at the end of the 2-km long tunnel, are to be set up; the existing outlet of Barwa Sagar shall be used to drop the link canal water into Betwa, through the Barwa river.

A rather, distressed Shahbaz Ahmad said the dam and the railway line would reduce forest cover and cut into the Panna Tiger Reserve. About 74 per cent of the submerged area comes under forests and parts are reserved falling within the Panna National Park. The area of the National Park under submergence is estimated at about 45 sq km. That may be a low-end estimate for a project expected to cost Rs 1988.74 crore. What is being left unsaid is that the Government will denotify parts of the National Park to accommodate the development projects and push Panna into the past.