Goa’s affidavit to the CEC is not a reasoned legal position — it’s an exercise in bureaucratic evasion dressed up as ecological argument. The state tells the Central Empowered Committee that the forest complex linking Mhadei, Mollem and Cotigao is merely a corridor used by transient tigers, and therefore unfit for notification as a tiger reserve. That phrasing matters. Calling moving animals “transient” — and then using that label to refuse protections — is an administrative sleight of hand that shifts responsibility from politicians and land managers to the animals themselves.
This is not an academic quibble. The Mhadei–Cotigao landscape already performs the function of a passageway between Karnataka’s Kali and Maharashtra’s Sahyadri reserves: tigers move because humans have fragmented their world. The state’s affidavit, filed on October 14 and later reported by Indian Express, treats that mobility as disqualifying rather than compelling. By that logic, any corridor that helps transient tigers disperse could be written off. The consequence is simple: corridors remain unprotected, dispersing tigers remain exposed, and the burden of proof for protection is shifted onto animals that leave no bureaucratic address.
The language of absence: transient tigers vs resident tigers
The Goa affidavit leans heavily on two technical claims: first, that there is no evidence of resident, breeding tigers (no tigresses, no cubs); second, that the presence indicators — including scat DNA noted in national reports — do not prove residency. Scientific caution should matter in conservation decisions, but the state’s reasoning omits a crucial piece: absence of evidence in a fragmented, poorly surveyed landscape is different from evidence of absence. The government demands an inviolate core of 800–1,200 sq km to justify a reserve, then points out that Goa’s protected network is roughly 745 sq km and that carving more land is “not feasible.” That is a policy choice, not an ecological impossibility.
This is where the affidavit’s logic loops into refusal. Instead of proposing measures to expand protection, improve monitoring, or remove barriers to connectivity, the government invokes population thresholds and administrative burdens — houses to be resettled, claims under the Forest Rights Act, and the practical difficulties of relocation in a small state. Those are real problems. But the right question is not whether declaring a reserve is convenient; it is whether failing to do so is defensible when dispersing transient tigers are using the landscape and when past violence against tigers shows a lethal vulnerability.
Past killings: evidence that Goa’s landscape is risky, also for transient tigers
The affidavit downplays prior incidents, calling the January 2020 poisoning of a tigress and her three cubs a “stray” event. That choice of words is a moral and political judgment. The 2020 deaths were not merely tragic; they were a warning signal that a landscape with human pressures, livestock issues, and poor enforcement can become lethal for transient tigers passing through. Investigations linked those deaths to retaliatory poisonings by forest-dwelling people whose cattle had been killed.
The NTCA’s expert team recommended a tiger reserve after that case precisely because dispersing animals without protected status can be killed with impunity. To treat that recommendation as optional, or to describe lethal retaliations as isolated anomalies, is to normalize a fatal risk to tigers and to excuse state inaction.
Moreover, the affidavit’s insistence that declaring a reserve would “criminalise traditional forest practices” and force impossible relocations frames community rights as both a practical and moral barrier. But the state offers no program for coexistence alternatives, no credible plan to compensate or involve communities in protection, and no steps toward conflict mitigation that do not rely on moving people. If relocation is genuinely infeasible, the only defensible policy answer is to design co-management, strengthen livelihoods, and fund patrols and rapid-response teams — not to hide behind the term “transient tigers” and punt on protection.
Political failure woven into technical language
This is the moment where administrative language becomes cover for political failure. The affidavit’s demands for an enormous inviolate core and its dismissal of scat DNA evidence read less like scientific caution and more like a checklist to sustain inaction. In practice, the argument protects political priorities — development, land claims, minimal administrative disruption — at the expense of ecological continuity. The state’s calculus privileges short-term friction over long-term survival. That is not conservation policy; it is abdication.
Embed that failure in the wider pattern: a patchwork of protected areas, insufficient enforcement, a backlog of forest-rights claims numbering in the thousands, and a governance apparatus more adept at parsing clauses than preventing poisonings. When the government says that the region functions primarily as a link between neighbouring reserves, the correct response is to treat it as a candidate for targeted protection measures — corridor legal status, anti-poaching funding, community patrol agreements, and incentives to keep cattle away from tiger pathways — not as a reason to deny reserve status.
The real betrayal lies in pretending that transient tigers need less protection simply because they move. tigers
Scientific standards as a gatekeeping tool
The government’s fixation on the absence of a breeding population aligns with a recurring tactic: set the evidentiary bar so high that conservation becomes administratively impossible. Requiring proof of resident tigresses or cubs in a transient landscape is akin to asking migratory birds to nest before a flyway is protected. DNA from scat is not a silver bullet, but it is evidence of presence where camera traps and surveys may be brief or under-resourced. Rather than use multiple lines of evidence to create an adaptive protection strategy, the affidavit treats each evidentiary imperfection as grounds for rejection.
This logic disproportionately harms wide-ranging species. Transient tigers disperse, explore, and recolonise; they do not read administrative gazettes. If governments insist on static definitions of “resident” wildlife, corridors will always lose. The result is predictable: tigers that move through states like Goa encounter roads, plantations, and communities without the buffer protections that reserves offer.
What the state refuses to discuss
What the affidavit does not say — and must be asked about — is how Goa plans to mitigate the real threats that dispersed tigers face. There is no robust plan for rapid conflict response, no commitment to fund camera grids or expanded monitoring, and no proposal to tackle the drivers of retaliation such as unprotected cattle grazing paths. Instead, the affidavit foregrounds administrative inconvenience and the number of people living in proposed protected areas (the filing cites both 1274 households and, inconsistently, earlier figures of over 100,000). That inconsistency is telling: when numbers suit convenience, they are precise; when they complicate the state’s argument, they become negotiable.
The public interest here is clear. A corridor that connects two thriving reserves is not a marginal strip; it is part of a functioning landscape. Protecting it does not require an all-or-nothing decision to displace millions or erase livelihoods. It requires targeted, practical governance: community agreements, regulated grazing routes, enhanced enforcement, and legally recognised corridor status that carries real penalties for wildlife crime. Such measures would benefit transient tigers and resident wildlife alike, ensuring the passage remains alive instead of abandoned to politics.
Accountability, not excuses
The CEC now holds Goa to account. The committee’s role is to evaluate whether the state’s technical arguments mask political choices. Calling tigers “transient” is a rhetorical device that absolves the government of responsibility: if animals are not “resident,” protections are optional. That is a policy position masquerading as science. The truth is stark — corridors need protection, dispersing animals need safe passage, also transient tigers, and previous poisonings show the lethal cost of ignoring those facts.
If Goa wishes to be judged on ecology rather than expediency, it must present a concrete, funded plan to safeguard transient tigers that move across its forests: expanded monitoring, community-based coexistence programs, compensation mechanisms, and criminal accountability for wildlife killings. Anything less is not conservation; it is a political choice to preserve short-term convenience over the long-term survival of a species that will not wait for bureaucratic permission to move.
Source: Indian Express, India
Photo: Indian Express, India
