Who allowed ‘minister’s fleet’ to enter Pilibhit reserve

Officials of Pilibhit Tiger Reserve (PTR) have been asked to explain how vehicles, other than those engaged by the forest department, were allowed to enter the forest area last Saturday.

A video that was doing the rounds on social media allegedly showed minister of state (MoS) Sanjay Singh Gangwar’s fleet moving through the tiger reserve, a restricted area for all private vehicles.

“The video reached us today. We have asked the officials in Pilibhit to check and find out how private vehicles were allowed to enter the forest,” said a senior official at the forest department headquarters in Lucknow.

The 25-second video, which was shot by a tourist purportedly on December 7, shows five vehicles moving through the forest area. The tourist was said to have taken the video from a safari vehicle. No private vehicles are allowed to ply protected forest areas in the state.

Pilibhit MLA Gangwar, who’s the MoS for sugarcane development, when contacted, neither confirmed nor denied the claims. “The video will be probed and only then things will become clear,” said the minister, who was in West Bengal to invite the state’s governor for the upcoming Mahakumbh Mela in Prayagraj.

When asked whether he had recently gone to Pilibhit Tiger Reserve, the minister replied: “I’m out of station. I will speak on the issue when I return.”

The forest staff in Pilibhit will now find out the exact place where the video was shot and get details of the vehicles that entered the reserve.

Forest minister Arun K Saxena too said on Sunday that the video would be probed and the forest staff would be asked to explain what exactly happened. The reserve received 23,579 tourists in 2022 and 54,567 in 2023.

PTR is home to over 127 animal, 326 bird and 2,100 flowering plant species. The Gomti River originates from the reserve, which is also the catchment of several other water bodies such as Sharda, Chuka and Mala Khannot. PTR’s core forest area is spread over 602.7980 sq.km and it has a buffer of 127.4518 sq.km.