Tiger scare keeps students off school in Damoh district

BHOPAL

: Residents of more than half-a-dozen villages in

Damoh district

are in panic owing to

tiger

movement in their area. The fear of the tiger is such that more than 200 children living in the fringe area stayed away from school on Saturday. A tiger is being sighted regularly near the villages close to Nauradehi sanctuary.


The tiger first started straying into the sanctuary in June this year . Though the sanctuary staff was tracking its pug marks, they were not able to sight it properly all through the monsoon. On Thursday, the tiger was first spotted by Gulli Adivasi, husband of Ashoka Rani, sarpanch of Somkheda village panchayat. “The tiger was walking on the concrete road of the village. It also went inside the village before vanishing in the woods”, he told TOI.

The tiger was also spotted at Sohela, Manka Khangar,Lamki Hinoti Ramgarh and othere villages, all located on the border of the sanctuary. The villagers are so scared that they did not send their children to school, said Ashoka Rani, the sarpanch of Somkheda having a population about 2000 people. “Even the villagers did not take out their cattle for grazing fearing the big cat”, she said.

The tiger seems to have reached Nauradehi from Panna national park through a forest corridor, said Kshitij Kumar, divisional forest officer of Nauradehi. “The tiger also made a kill in one of the villages and we are compensating the villagers”, he said.The DFO said, “The tiger is not venturing out of the jungle. Our team is continuously tracking the beast.” He also said that the tiger seems to have created its own territory.

In April this year, two big cats, one male and female, were translocated to Nauradehi. The female named Radha was brought from Kanha national park, while Kishen, the male, was relocated from Bandhavgarh national park. First, Radha and Kishen were housed in two different enclosures of iron mesh adjacent to each other. After these two tigers, another tiger appeared some time in the last week of June.