Worried over the slow pace of relocation of villages from tiger habitats, the Centre has constituted five committees to identify shortcomings in the process and suggest ways to expedite it. The step has come days after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked the tiger-bearing states to speed up village relocation to make the wildlife habitat inviolate and undisturbed for tigers.
The panels comprising wildlife experts and conservationists have been entrusted with the task to not only assess the actual progress in relocation of families in tiger reserves across the country but also suggest ways for expediting it in a "sensitive" manner.

"The experts would assess the progress on field implementation in relocation of families vis-a-vis the Wild Life Protection (Act) 1972 and the advisories or guidelines issued in this regard from the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA)," a senior official from the Authority said. The committee would also report on the shortfalls as well as complaints from the relocated people, if any, and suggest ways for improvement.

With merely 1,411 tigers left in the wild, man-animal conflict in the core and buffer areas, apart from poaching, have become a major cause of worry.
A Public Accounts Committee (PAC) too recently noted that there were 1,487 villages with 64,951 families living in the core and buffer areas in 26 out of the 28 tiger reserves as of July 2005.

Government had in 2008 increased the relocation package from Rs 1 lakh to Rs 10 lakhs as an incentive to the villagers to vacate the tiger reserves.
However, the PAC pointed that "till June 2005, a total of 80 villages or 2,904 families have been relocated from different tiger reserves.... At this snail pace and at this rate it will take more than a decade to relocate all the families from the core/buffer areas."

"We will further improve our strategy for relocation, once the teams submit report which will be within three months," the official added.
A team comprising conservationists RK Singh and RP Mishra will monitor relocation progress in Uttrakhand and Rajasthan while DS Srivastav, Samir K Sinha (WTI) and Bibhav Talukdar (Aranyak) will monitor reserves in Chattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. Tiger reserves situated in Mizoram and Assam will be studied by Rathin Barman and M. Firoz Ahmad while Ajay Desai and Pravin Bhargava have been asked to monitor village relocation process in the reserves of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.