All the five tiger reserves in Tamil Nadu are managed well as per the National Tiger Conservation Authority’s (NTCA) fifth cycle of the Management Effectiveness Evaluation (MEE) for 2022. The Anamalai Tiger Reserve (ATR) and the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve (MTR) ranked fifth and eighth among the 51 tiger reserves in the country, besides improving their ranking from ‘very good’ to ‘excellent’. The two are among the 12 tiger reserves in the ‘excellent’ category.
While ATR bagged an MEE score of 91.67%, MTR got 90.15%. The Sathyamangalam Tiger Reserve (STR) and the Kalakkad and Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve (KMTR) continued to be in the ‘very good’ category, scoring 84.85% and 83.33% respectively. The Srivilliputhur-Megamalai Tiger Reserve, which underwent its first MEE assessment after being declared a tiger reserve in 2021, scored 60.94% and was adjudged to be ‘good’.
The MEE exercise was carried out based on the framework by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) through six assessment elements – context, planning, input, process, output and outcomes.
ATR Field Director S. Ramasubramanian said the tiger reserve carried out various outreach programmes during the assessment period, including hornbill festivals and jumbo trials, to impart knowledge on key species and their conservation. A state-of-the-art interpretation centre was also opened.
“With regard to field work, the staff clocked more than 10 km of patrols in their given area daily and made the entries in the M-STrIPES (Monitoring System for Tiger-Intensive Protection and Ecological Status) app, an NTCA tool. No fire was reported in the tiger reserve last year. ATR successfully involved indigenous people in conservation activities, which also offered them livelihood opportunities. The elephant camp of the tiger reserve is well managed and the mahouts bagged the ‘Gaj Gaurav Award’ instituted by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change,” he said. ATR also saw an increase in the tourism revenue from ₹3.5 crore to ₹6 crore.
MTR Field Director D. Venkatesh said the jump in the raking was an outcome of various effective conservation practices being followed in the tiger reserve. “MTR scored 50 out of 50 for ‘outcomes’, one of the six elements for the assessment, he said.
A full-fledged exercise will be conducted to identify areas that need to be improved once the detailed figures for each tiger reserve are released, said Chief Wildlife Warden Srinivas Reddy. “STR has improved the score, but it has still retained the ‘very good’ category. Only KMTR has held on to its score. We’ll look into it when the score for each criteria is released,” he said.
“Our aim is to bring all tiger reserves in the State into the ‘excellent’ category. This [the score] is relative grading. All tiger reserves strive to improve, and our improvement has to be little more than theirs to emerge in the top,” Mr. Reddy added.
