By Sudeshna Sarkar, IANS,
Kathmandu : After marauding elephant herds created bad blood between Nepal’s border villages and India, now big cats are threatening to strain ties between the two neighbours.
Nepal’s lawmakers are concerned about reports that India’s Uttar Pradesh state, which borders part of Nepal in the south, is planning a tiger reserve along the open border.
“There is a possibility of the tigers straying into Nepal’s border villages,” said Nepali legislator Padam Lal Bishwokarma. “What is even more alarming is that there are indications the proposed tiger park extends right inside Nepal.”
Last month, after a spate of reports in the Nepali media that India’s border patrols were wreaking havoc in Nepal’s border villages in Dang district, Bishwokorma led a team of seven more MPs from the major parties to the western region for a first-hand assessment.
“In the forests of Bankata-Bharsaiya, we found the trees have been painted yellow,” the Maoist lawmaker told IANS. “It was obviously some sort of marker.”
The parliamentarian delegation held talks with Shakti Singh Thakur, assistant commander of the 18th Gorkha Company of the Indian Shasatra Seema Bal across the border, to discover the reason. They were told it was done by the forest division of Uttar Pradesh in preparation for the tiger reserve.
“It is an obvious encroachment on Nepal’s territory,” the Nepali MP said. “The proposed tiger reserve has come right inside Nepal.”
The Uttar Pradesh government, the Nepali team was told, is planning to build the tiger reserve in its Balarampur district adjoining Nepal.
“We are going to bring this to the notice of Nepal’s parliament and foreign ministry,” Bishwokarma said. “Then the foreign ministry will be asked to take up the matter with the Indian government.”
The proposed tiger reserve controversy comes close on the heels of a growing furore over the death of at least three wild elephants in eastern Nepal’s Jhapa district.
About 10 days ago, the herd entered Jhapa’s Baundangi village, apparently driven by heavy rains in India’s Assam state.
The tuskers destroyed over 200 huts and destroyed crops worth millions of rupees, causing the enraged villagers to drive them out.
While one elephant was killed by an electric fence, two others died due to the standoff with the villagers.
It has created a storm in India with wildlife activists demanding humane treatment of the herds.
Nepal’s wildlife rights activists say the two countries should jointly come up with a compensatory mechanism to appease the villagers, who are accusing the Indian authorities of deliberately unleashing the herd on them.