Chief minister Prithviraj Chavan will launch a “Leave Me Alone” campaign, aimed at indicating no tolerance to poaching in the state, on July 30 by officially burning wildlife contraband at the Sahyadri Guest House. The contraband will include tiger and leopard skins and elephant tusks seized by the wildlife and forest department of government of Maharashtra.
While the Leave Me Alone campaign was launched on July 29, as the third annual Global Tiger Day marking the international importance of the species is a day later, the contraband burning exercise was also pushed back. The campaign is an education, awareness-building, and activist campaign to save India’s iconic national animal and is a joint initiative of Sanctuary Asia and Save the Tiger, the Facebook tiger conservation social media platform with 2.7 million supporters with active support from the wildlife and forest department. There are an estimated 1,800 wild tigers in India today, down from approximately 1,00,000 in 1900.
In the presence of his Cabinet colleagues and officials of the Maharashtra forest department, along with members of Sanctuary Asia, and Raj Krishnani of Save the Tiger, Mr Chavan and Dr Patangrao Kadam, minister of forests will announce at Tuesday’s event that poaching will not be tolerated in Maharashtra.
Mr Chavan will also outline policy steps taken to curb the global rise in the illegal wildlife trade, which is tightly linked to the international trade in narcotics and weapons. This has been identified by both Central and state governments as a key reason for the increased poaching pressure on the tiger in Maharashtra and other states.