Uttar Pradesh's fourth tiger reserve to come up in Chitrakoot's Ranipur

In a bid to promote tiger conservation, UP State Wildlife Board will develop a new tiger reserve in Chitrakoot's Ranipur. This will be the fourth tiger reserve in UP after Dudhwa, Pilibhit and Amangarh.

While the plan to create the Ranipur Tiger Reserve received approval from the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) long ago, the final go ahead was announced in a meeting on Friday. The notification of the reserve along with marking of buffer zones is expected to follow soon.

In a bid to preserve the flora and fauna, specially the tigers of Ranipur, a 639 square kilometre area in Chitrakoot will be developed to create the Ranipur Tiger Reserve. Though the region has always had a low population of tigers, most of these have migrated from the Panna Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh (approx 150 km away from the earmarked sanctuary region).

Notably, the state too has been offering a favourable habitat to the big cats, which led to the growth in their numbers from 117 tigers in 2014 to 173 tigers in 2018. At present, the count is somewhere near the 200-mark.

As per sources, all formalities of the sanctuary have been completed and the government will soon notify the land and mark its core and buffer zones. In addition to this, separate funds for development in Ranipur, its management & security, have also been marked to ensure systematic flow of things.