In a shocking incident, a 72-year-old man was mauled to death by a tiger in a village near the Corbett Tiger Reserve in Uttarakhand.
The incident happened at around 6 pm on Thursday at Laduasain village in Rikhnikhal block close to the wildlife sanctuary, forest ranger Mahendra Singh Rawat said.
The victim, identified as Virendra Singh, had gone to his field near his home to harvest the wheat crop when he was attacked by a tiger hiding behind the bushes.
The tiger dragged Singh around 100 metres into the nearby forest, the forest ranger said.
Villagers gathered at the spot with burning torches, searched for Singh, and found his body a few hours later.
Singh's head was partially eaten by the tiger when they recovered the body from the forest.
According to the villagers, they had been seeing the movement of tigers in the area for some time and had also informed forest officials about it.
They claimed that around half a dozen cattle in the area have been killed in suspected tiger attacks in just a week.
The tiger reserve, named after legendary hunter-turned-conservationist Jim Corbett has one of the highest densities of big cats in any national park in India.
Though rare, tigers have been spotted outside the reserve and blamed for killing humans and animals.
In December 2022, two people were killed by tigers in two separate incidents near Jim Corbett national park.
While the first victim was a mentally-unstable man, the second was a man who had ventured into the restricted area at night with two friends to have a drink.
A tiger dragged him away, and his body was recovered from the forest the next morning.
According to the recently released tiger census data, the number of tigers in the country increased to 3,167 in 2022 from 2,967 in 2018.
With this, India is currently home to 75 per cent of the world's tiger population.
The census data showed that the tiger population has gone up in the Shivalik Hills-Gangetic Plains landscape, central India and the Sundarbans. Still, their numbers have dwindled in the Western Ghats and the Northeast-Brahmaputra Plains due to habitat loss, fragmentation and poaching over the years.
"The tiger population in the forest divisions of the Shivalik Hills and Gangetic Plains landscape has recorded a substantial increase with a total of 804 unique tigers being photographed, which is higher than the estimated population of 646 in 2018," according to the "Status of Tigers Report 2022".
It said photographic evidence of tigers in new areas of Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh provides hope for range expansion.
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