I looked at the blog link. It is pretty blatant in its effort to exonerate Satyendra. I had seen in Hindi movies that they try to convert a murder case into a suicide case by a mentally deranged person. In this case they are applying that formula on the poor cub and declaring it mentally deranged and in distress.

I have confirmed it with my driver who was just infront of Satyendra's Vehicle during the incident. And there were only a couple of other vehicles during that time. And my driver lives near the hotel (I was told they haven't named it yet for tax reasons) set up by Satyendra Tiwari and is very sympathetic to him. It appears there is a concerted effort to diffuse this case. I have nothing against the accused, but it would be unfortunate if justice doesn't prevail. This can be a bad precedent. Tomorrow, any foreigner or influential person can come and mow down a tiger and try to prove that the tiger had problems and died of natural causes.

There are plans to bring Gaur from Kanha to Bandhavgarh so that people have something to photograph apart from Tigers.

Bandhavgarh is unable to handle its success. There are lot of tourists. The tourism has to be controlled. Instead of limiting the numbers, the park authorities has divided it into various zones and as a result the tala zone (where the cub was mowed down by Satyendra) has become much smaller. I would say 20 vehicles for the entire tala zone (before the break up into magdih zone) would be the right number to permit.

In Bandhavgarh a lot of focus is on maintaining roads. The out come is that the construction workers disturb wildlife. And also the outcome is people speed. To counter it, again more construction workers are sent to create humps. It is a vicious cycle.

I don't mind more gypsys congregating at a place. By limiting number of gypsys, it is like attacking a symptom not a root cause. The root cause is less area and more gypsys. Less area means, less money from tourism to the department. That is not a problem at all. Bandhavgarh authorities should open up other ranges. Better to move the elephants from tala zone to other ranges. Tourists can then go there for elephant joy ride and not crowd in the Tala zone.

Sabyasachi