Notwithstanding the scorching summer heat, wild life lovers and tourists made a beeline this summer at the Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve (TATR) in Chandrapur breaching previous highs of daily gate entries.
The TATR field office recorded a phenomenal 40% rise in the tourist-flow at Tadoba in 2009-10 over the previous year, with more than a lakh visitors generating a revenue of Rs26.86 lakh on account of the entry fee. What's more, officials say, even in a particularly warm summer, the number of tourists flooding TATR actually shot up in April and May, all because of the certainty in
sighting of tigers this time around.
More than 30,000 tourists flooded Tadoba in April and May 2010 at an average 578 tourists entering the reserve every day in more than 80 vehicles. The 2008-09 fiscal saw 68,183 tourists enter TATR, while the 2009-10-season drew in 103,693 tourists, almost a three-fold rise as compared to 2002-03-season when only 30,951 tourists came to the pristine forests of Tadoba, according to the TATR field office data.
Officials say the TATR is becoming popular across the country now. The private and government-run resorts around Tadoba also did a brisk business this season, they said.
“Because of easy sightings of tigers, tourist flow increased this year,” Sanjay Thakare, the TATR field director said. “Liberal publicity in the media too helped fuel the tourist interest and curiosity.”
The summer followed one of the worst meteorological droughts this year, and the wild animals in the Tadoba forests were mainly dependent on the man-made water holes, officials said.
The increased tourist flow came with some obvious problems though. Tourists, say forest officials, are not sufficiently educated in the dos and don’ts of forest tourism. “They forget that it’s not recreational; you are actually disturbing the wild life if you create a ruckus and noise in their territory,” Thakare said.
There were incidents when officials had to fine and warn some tourists to behave inside Tadoba.
Top forest officials and wild life conservationists in Chandrapur are of the view that there should be restrictions in the tourist movement in the TATR, which remains one of the important tiger conservation foci of the authorities. For some reasons, unlike other national parks and sanctuaries that remain closed for tourists during monsoon, the TATR is kept open for tourists during the four rainy months.
“Tourism for us is a secondary issue,” an official said. “Our priority is conservation but people forget that and instead complain that we stop them from going in. But if we don’t conservation efforts will suffer.”
