Umrer, July 31: The huge footprint, alongside some smaller ones, has rekindled hopes. Jai, the missing lover boy with a roving eye, might be somewhere near.
Forest officials and volunteers have been keeping their fingers crossed since two tiger enthusiasts, on a tip-off from a cattle grazer, spotted a big, fresh pugmark on Friday, in the teak and shrub forests of Umrer block, 60km south of Nagpur city, and relayed the information on WhatsApp.
They believe it could be Jai, the 250kg big cat named after Amitabh Bachchan's character in Sholay, who has been missing since April 18.
From Umrer-Karhandla sanctuary, Jai's home since 2013, the pugmark spot is about 30km to the west and well within the seven-year-old, seven-footer tiger's range. "There is a strong possibility that this indeed is Jai," Mayur Waghmare, a tiger enthusiast, insisted when he led this correspondent to the spot yesterday.
Several factors appear to have fed such hopes: the size of the pugmark, 10 cattle deaths in the vicinity over the past few days and the smaller pugmarks, possibly that of a female.
"He has a very high libido," chuckled Nitin Desai, central India coordinator of the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI). "He loves to court females."
The tiger has been known to court every flame in the forest that caught his eye. He has been prolific too, fathering over 10 cubs in the past three years. "This one's no small tiger," Desai added. "He's an icon."
Desai wasn't exaggerating. From cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar to Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray, the majestic cat has attracted hundreds of people to the little-known, newly declared Umrer-Karhandla sanctuary, catapulting it into a popular destination in just three years. No wonder "Finding Jai" is now a mission, a search that has already spanned hundreds of kilometres.
The tiger went off the radar on April 18, when the radio collar, fitted by the Dehradun-based Wildlife Institute of India as part of a joint research project with the Maharashtra Forest Department, apparently malfunctioned and stopped sending coordinates.
For over a fortnight now, enthusiasts and nature lovers like Mayur, tiger conservationists, forest guards and officials, and more than a hundred volunteers from wildlife NGOs are scouring the forests from Gondia to Wardha and from Nagpur to Chandrapur districts for the feline, in a search perhaps unprecedented in the country.
The principal chief conservator of forests (wildlife), Shree Bhagwan, the state's wildlife warden, has directed all chief conservators of forests in the region to seek help from volunteers.
Speaking at an official event on Tiger's Day on July 28 in Nagpur, Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis and forest minister Sudhir Mungantiwar assured people that the tiger would be found.
Jai had first hit the headlines in 2013 when he arrived at the Umrer sanctuary, migrating a hundred kilometres in search of a new territory and a new mate. "His journey itself was astonishing; he had travelled this distance, crossing highways and rivers and many villages in between," said Rohit Karoo, a tiger conservationist who's coordinating the search. "Thereafter he became a craze."
Karoo and his team have mapped the entire landscape, formed teams of volunteers that include local people, and have already reached out to 400 villages in Nagpur, Wardha, Chandrapur, Bhandara and Gondia districts.#Karoo said this was the longest that the tiger, which had disappeared for two months earlier, has not been sighted. But Nagpur's honorary wildlife warden hopes Jai will be found soon, courting a new mate.
He is banking on the smaller pugmarks.
