Endosulfan driven away tigers from Kasargod?

KASARGOD: Had there been tigers in the 11 grama panchayats in the district where endosulfan was sprayed aerially from 1982 onwards?According to the report on monitoring of endosulfan residues in the 11 panchayats published by the Kerala State Council for Science, Technology and Environment (KSCST) Thiruvananthapuram, the tigers in the area disappeared after endosulfan had been sprayed in the area. The report was published in 2011. The state government had shelled out Rs 10 lakh to prepare the report.The part relating to the flora and fauna was written by Dr V S Vijayan, former chairman of the Kerala Biodiversity Board. He said: “The study area which was rich in faunal diversity had lost it during the spraying of endosulfan. A large number of wild animals including Nilgiri langur, tiger, jackal, wild boar etc completely disappeared when endosulfan spraying commenced”.Even though the study says that wild boars have totally disappeared from the area, a grievance submitted by the farmers here to the authorities says that their crops are still being destroyed by wild boars.As for Nilgiri langurs, they had never been in the area. According to the book ‘Man Eaters and Jungle Killers’ by well-known hunter Kenneth Anderson, the Nilgiri langurs had never been sighted in Malabar. According to Forest officials, tigers had disappeared from the forest adjoining Western Ghats in Kasargod more than a hundred years ago. Tigers are rarely sighted even in the Karnataka forests which was once their habitat. When contacted, Dr V S Vijayan said he had visited the endosulfan-sprayed areas and the villagers told him that tigers had disappeared from the area when endosulfan was started to be sprayed. What Dr Vijayan collected was secondary information from villagers which should not have been published by a prestigious scientific institution like KSCST since it was not a standard practice used by scientists.