Poachers kill rhino during minister visit

In what was a most embarrassing moment on Wednesday for Assam forest minister Pramila Rani Brahama and the entire forest department, poachers struck just when she was reviewing the conservation effort at Kaziranga National Park and killed a female rhino in the Agoratoli range of the park.

What was doubly embarrassing was that a section of forest department officials then reportedly tried to destroy the carcass with chemicals and salts to cover up their lapse.

The forest minister, who was on a two-day visit to the park and learnt of this from different sources, rushed to Agoratoli range the very same night and tried to recover the carcass, furious at having been kept in the dark. “They (the forest officials) should have told me. It was still daytime when the incident happened, I could have activated NGOs and people from the community and we could have tried to nab the poachers,” she said.

The park authorities pointed out that local villagers had raised an alarm after hearing three gunshots at about 3.30 pm. Agriculture minister Atul Bora, water resources minister Keshab Mahanta and five other MLAs were also present at the park then.

Ms Brahma, accompanied by the water resources minister, visited the erosion-hit areas of Kaziranga on Thursday. Poachers have killed 193 rhinos in the Kaziranga National Park since 2001. The BJP, which came to power in the 2016 Assembly polls, stated in its vision document that it would stop the rhino killings that had rocked the Congress regime.