Tourenga, the biggest and most important range of the Udanti-Sitanadi Tiger Reserve (USTR) has been encroached upon by people from Odisha. Several unregulated brick kilns have come up in the area and there is blatant illegal felling of saal trees.

 

 

Tourenga is the only range connecting Core 1 and Core 2 of the USTR and an important section between the Sunbeda Sanctuary Odisha and USTR. Close to 70 per cent of forests of this Range has been completely wiped out under the very nose of the authorities.

 

The Sunbeda Sanctuary (proposed to be a Tiger Reserve), USTR and Indrawati Tiger Reserve together form a corridor for the tigers. The main function of the corridor, which is a kind of forest strip between protected forests, is to provide a safe passage from one protected forest to another.

 

These corridors are crucial for maintaining sustainable gene pools by allowing the animals from one sanctuary to breed with the animals from another and in the absence of which there would be inbreeding. It is important to note that tigers and wild buffaloes use this passage to move between the two protected forests. If Tourenga forests are destroyed, this connection will be destroyed forever.

 

Saal is the second most precious timber after Sagon and Saal trees are very effective in regulating the temperature, but these trees are only seen on both sides of the road whereas they are almost destroyed in the internal part of the range. The entire range has become devoid of the saal trees. The timber mafia dries up this 200 to 300-year-old trees by Girdling and then cut them. The range is shockingly littered with dead stumps of Saal trees.

 

The Tourenga range is also under assault by the large numbers of brick kilns, which are a big source of pollution. It’s questionable as to how these kilns are operating inside the Tiger Reserve. These kilns also source their fuel that is wood from jungles, which means kiln operators are also illegally felling trees.As the Indagaon area of the USTR hogged media’s and thereafter Forest Department’s attention, Tourenga which is worst affected range remained overlooked. Seven out of the eight USTR ranges are adjoining the Odisha, which made them vulnerable to encroachment on large scale. Many small-time settlements have now evolved into full-fledged villages. Most of these encroachers are encouraged by the greed of getting certificate under the Forest Rights Act, which has come as a bane for the forests in Chhattisgarh.

 

Chairman of the committee investigating the encroachments in USTR Dewashish Das told The Hitavada that the probe has already completed and the report will be submitted to Principal Chief Conservator of Forest (PCCF), soon. However, the investigation team didn’t probe at Tourenga, but now that ‘The Hitavada’ has brought this into his attention, he will surely take cognisance of the matter.