Tiger Jai’s son Srinivas found electrocuted, Maha forest officials suspect poaching
than a year after Jai the tiger went missing, his son, Srinivas, who was radiocollared last year, was found electrocuted in the Naghbid forest range that falls under the Brahmapuri forest division of Chandrapur district.
Forest officials are not ruling out that the two-year-old sub-adult tiger was poached by locals. “Yes, Srinivas died after being electrocuted. It could be a case of poaching,” Girish Vasishtha, spokesperson for the wildlife wing of the forest department, told HT. “Investigations are on, and the territorial forest officials are interrogating a farmer and his son.”
On Thursday afternoon, forest officials dug out Srinivas’ body. Forest officials said it was April 19 that Srinivas got electrocuted by an electric fence put up by Mahadev Irpate, a farmer, to protect his paddy fields from herbivores such as deers and sambars. The next morning, the team from the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) that fits and monitors radio-collared tigers received a ‘mortality signal’ that gets triggered by the collar if the tiger does not move for four hours at a stretch. Following this, Srinivas’ damaged radio collar with missing bolts and nuts was found near a nullah between Kothurna and Maushi villages in the forest range. “The father-son duo threw the radio collar 200 metre s from the spot, and buried the tiger on their land. Further investigations were being con ducted,” said an official request ing anonymity. “It was the dam aged radio collar found on Apri 20 that led us to the farm.”
Wildlife lovers and photogra phers from Conservation, Len ses and Wildlife questioned the forest department’s inability to find – and perhaps save – Srini vas. “If radio collars monitor the movement of tigers, the WII team along with forest officials should have known that Srinivas is walking around human habita tion. They could have warded him off with firecrackers or some other mechanism,” said Sarosh Lodhi of CLAW.
Despite being protected under Schedule 1 of the Wildlife Protec tion Act, 1986, 84 tigers died in Maharashtra between 2010 and 2017, of which 25 were poached found a study by NGO Wildlife Protection Survey of India .