A tigress killed a forest ranger inside a national reserve in the Indian state of Rajasthan on Sunday, authorities confirmed.
He was the second human victim of the tigress named Kankati. A seven-year-old child was killed by the same predator in Ranthambore Tiger Reserve in Sawai Madhopur last month.
The ranger, Devendra Chaudhary, 40, was killed Sunday afternoon after the animal grabbed him by the neck and dragged him into the forest, according to eyewitnesses.
Chaudhary was taken to a local hospital but declared dead on arrival, a forest official told The Times of India. Chaudhary is survived by his wife and one-and-a-half-year-old son.
“Tourism has been suspended in parts of the reserve where the tigress was last seen,” Ranthambhore’s field director, KR Anoop, told The Independent.
He said the state’s forest department formed a committee on Tuesday to decide whether to relocate Kankati.
They had also halted pilgrimage to the Trinetra Ganesh temple inside the reserve until further notice, he said.
Forest officials said there had been increased sightings of tigers along the pilgrim route to the temple and at an old fort inside the reserve.
Kankati fatally attacked a seven-year-old boy walking back from the temple with his grandmother on April 16. The tiger reportedly emerged from the forest and dragged the child away.
Kankati is the daughter of an ageing tigress named Arrowhead. Kankati is a Hindi word that roughly translates to someone with a torn ear. Kankati is identifiable to rangers and safari guides by her torn ear.
Mr Anoop told The Independent the forest department had resorted to using firecrackers to deter tigers from crowded areas inside the reserve for now.
He said the department started “bursting crackers to keep tigers away after the last incident of last month” in which the seven-year-old was killed.
Reserve workers started feeding Kankati’s mother in 2023 after a hip injury left her unable to hunt, The Indian Express reported.
Her cubs – Kankati and two other tigresses – too started feeding on the bait and came to roam crowded areas near Jogi Mahal, an iconic hunting lodge used by erstwhile rulers of the region.
There are 13-14 tigers currently active in the vicinity of the temple, the fort and Jogi Mahal.
The newspaper reported that officials dismissed calls to shift Kankati after last month’s fatality and instead opted to use firecrackers to deter tigers.
Like the Trinetra Ganesh temple in Ranthambore, there are religious sites inside several other tiger reserves in India where pilgrims routinely make offerings.
The National Tiger Conservation Authority has mandated that every reserve develop plans to manage religious tourism, but a 2019 study found that efforts to implement conservation measures had been hampered by the challenge of balancing ecological protection with community visitation rights.
One example is Kerala’s Periyar Tiger Reserve, where the Sabarimala temple, a renowned Hindu shrine, draws five to six million pilgrims each year. Activists say it causes disturbance to the wildlife and significant environmental damage to the reserve’s fragile forest ecosystem.
Kankati is not the first maneater in Ranthambore. A tiger named Ustad was linked to the deaths of four people in the reserve between 2010 and 2015. The animal killed a local villager in July 2010 and another in March 2012. In October 2012, it reportedly killed a forest guard and in May 2015 fatally mauled Rampal Saini, a veteran forest ranger, near the Trinetra Ganesh temple.
The May 2015 attack sparked outrage among local villagers who demanded that Ustad be relocated. The maneater was removed to the Sajjangarh Biological Park in Udaipur in 2016.
Ustad died on 28 December 2022.
