: The Legendary IFS Officer Who Adopted a Tigress As His Own Daughter #IndiaNEWS #Environment On 5 October 1974, a female tiger cub was brought to Saroj Raj Choudhury, the founder Field Director of

The Legendary IFS Officer Who Adopted a Tigress As His Own Daughter #IndiaNEWS #Environment
On 5 October 1974, a female tiger cub was brought to Saroj Raj Choudhury, the founder Field Director of the Similipal Tiger Reserve in the Mayurbhanj district of Odisha, which lies on the fringe of the Eastern Ghats. The cub was found unattended near the Khairi river, by the members of the Kharia tribal community, who were collecting honey from the core area of the tiger reserve. This was the start of a special seven-year relationship between one of India’s most important wildlife conservationists and his beloved tigress Khairi (named after the river), which caught the attention of the national media and wildlife enthusiasts from around the world.
Khairi became a ‘free-living family member’ at Choudhury’s official bungalow in Jashipur, and also established a close bond with cousin sister, Nihar Nalini. She was fed with mutton and milk powder, slept on their beds and often played with them. Choudhury also closely observed her to study the various behavioural aspects of tigers, especially the use of pheromones, their mating behaviour and territoriality, among others.
However, long before Choudhury took over as the Simlipal Tiger Reserve’s first Field Director and met Khairi, he had already established himself as a pioneer of wildlife conservation, particularly of tigers, in India. From developing the pugmark tracking technique, which was the bedrock of organising tiger censuses in India till 2004 and the foundation of India’s much vaunted Project Tiger initiative, to mentoring generations of forest officers in the finer nuances of wildlife conservation, Choudhury remains a legend to this day.
Saroj Raj Choudhury with Khairi. (Image courtesy Twitter/Ramesh Pandey IFS)
Early Days
Born on 13 August 1924, in a village near Cuttack, Odisha, Choudhury grew up amidst wildlife, including tigers.
Those were the good old times in the thirties during my school days, when the tiger used to live in the vicinity of our rural home, he writes in his 1978-79 academic paper Predatory Aberration of the Tiger.
Choudhury started his career as a forest officer in the Government of Odisha on 1 April 1949 and rose through the ranks to become its first Wildlife Conservation Officer in 1966. It was only by the 1960s, when he became a prominent figure in wildlife conservation.
“Few people know that he eliminated a number of man-eaters in Odisha during the 1960s, thus saving both local lives and other innocent tigers from public retaliation. Choudhury was an accomplished officer before Khairi came along and after spending significant time in the field in Odisha, where he oversaw a rigorous tiger census in 1968, he went on deputation to join the Forest Research Institute, Dehradun as a Senior Research Officer.

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