Karnataka - Bangalore

PCCF: we need more personnel

Bangalore: Sixty to seventy per cent of the forest guard posts are vacant in the Mysore forest belt, where man-elephant conflict has intensified over the last week, claiming the lives of seven elephants.

Dilip Kumar, Principal Chief Conservator of Forests, has said that the acute shortage of personnel made it difficult to keep elephants away from human habitation in these areas.

“The guards are overworked and are short of infrastructure and vehicles. We need more personnel and resources to be able to drive away elephants from the fields,” said Mr. Dilip Kumar told presspersons on the sidelines of a meeting of the Karnataka State Retired Forest Officers’ Association. “Unlike the administrative service, the forest service is supposed to have a pyramidical structure with a large number of people on the ground.”

Another reason for the large number of elephant herds entering fields was because their numbers had increased over the years, he said. “Records show that the forest belts of Bandipur, Nagarahole and B.R. Hills belt had around 800 elephants each in the 1980s. Now that number has risen to around 1,500 in each area.”

Mr. Dilip Kumar added that elephant migratory corridors had been disturbed, in particular by irrigation projects such as the Kabini canal. The Forest Department would be repairing trenches and electric fences in the buffer zones, he said.

Lokayukta N. Santosh Hegde said that the lack of a uniform policy on transfers in the services had given much scope for corruption. “There should be a three-year assured tenure so that the issue of transfers is not misused by politicians. A committee should be constituted to look into transfers and politicians should have no role to play in it,” he said.

Former Chief Justice of India M.N. Venkatachalaiah said that decisions about postings should be done by civil service officers and not by politicians. The police service was particularly marred by political meddling he said, adding that a survey had revealed that the average tenure of a Superintendent of Police in Uttar Pradesh was just four months.

Manohar Anand, a fine arts student from Mysore, and a self-professed fan of the late Australian “crocodile hunter” Steve Irwin, was felicitated by the association for wrestling with a 10-ft crocodile that had entered a residential quarters near the backwater of Kabini. Mr. Anand said he used ropes and his own clothes to overpower and safely send back the crocodile to the river on October 30 to the relief of the terrified residents.

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