Chennai ,March 29,2025
A day after a 38-year-old man was killed in a tiger attack in The Nilgiris, the Tamil Nadu forest department got into action by fixing camera traps and deploying surveillance teams.
A senior official of the Tamil Nadu forest department said that the department has stepped up surveliiance in the spot where the farmer was found dead on Thursday (March 27).
He also said that a 20-member team from the forest department has been deployed for monitoring the killer tiger. The team ,according to the forest department patrol around the locality 24×7.
Also, 15 camera traps were placed to monitor the movement of the carnivore.
The official also said that the department was also taking measures toncapture the tiger by placing cages around.
It may be recalled that M Kendhar Kuttan, a Toda tribe from Kollakodumund, a hamlet in ‘Governor Shola’, was mauled to death by a tiger on Thursday (March 27) while he had entered forest on late Wednesday night in search of his missing buffalo.
The villagers spotted his partially eaten body amidst a thicket on Thursday.
This is the second incident of life loss in a fortnight, as a 50-year-old woman who went missing recently while plucking tea leaves in an estate in Kalibata near Ooty was killed in an attack by a leopard.
Meanwhile, the Nilgiris MP, A Raja, handed over Rs ten lakhs as the government’s compensation to the kin of the deceased at their house on Friday.
“A special scheme will be rolled out soon to mitigate frequent incidents of man-animal conflicts in the Nilgiris,” he said to the media.
The Nilgiris landscape, where Ooty is located, is known to have the highest tiger population in the country.
The contiguous forest stretch includes regions in both Kerala and Tamil Nadu, spanning the Periyar–Meghamalai cluster and the Anamalai–Parambikulam complex.
According to the 2022 nationwide tiger census conducted by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), Tamil Nadu recorded 306 tigers, up from 264 in 2018.
Over the past two decades, the tiger population in the region has quadrupled.
Tiger conservation in India has evolved in two significant phases. The first phase began in the 1970s with the enactment of the Wildlife Protection Act and the establishment of protected areas.
The second phase, starting around 2005–2006, saw the adoption of a landscape-level conservation approach and stricter monitoring systems.
In 2018, India’s tiger population was estimated at 981, while the 2022 census recorded 824 unique individuals through camera traps and other scientific methods.
