Pawan Kalyan orders high-level study on wildlife deaths, tigers first

Deputy Chief Minister and Environment and Forests Minister K. Pawan Kalyan on 3 September 2026 ordered a comprehensive study on wildlife deaths in Andhra Pradesh, with tigers as the priority species. The order sits in the Culture beat here as a conservation-and-habitat story about how the State intends to account for animals lost in its forests, not as a cinema note.

A high-level committee will run the study. Forest Department Advisor P. Mallikarjuna Rao is to chair. Additional Principal Chief Conservator of Forests Rahul Pandey is the member-convener. That two-name structure — an advisor in the chair, an APCCF as convener — is the locked administrative design.

The committee’s brief, as locked, is wide. It is to examine wildlife deaths, habitats, anti-poaching measures, monitoring systems, forest fires and water sources. It is to look at programmes for tigers, leopards and elephants. It is to address human–wildlife conflict. It is to prepare a special report on habitat, food, corridors and community. In other words, the minister has asked not only for a mortality count but for a systems audit of why animals die and how people and forests share space.

Wildlife death studies fail when they become press notes without field protocols. Pawan Kalyan’s order will matter if the committee publishes methods, time windows and habitat maps, and if tiger priority does not erase leopard, elephant and conflict data. The locked facts do not yet include a death tally, a reserve-wise list, or a deadline for the special report. This cutting does not invent those numbers.

Established facts only: Dy CM and Environment/Forests Minister K. Pawan Kalyan; comprehensive wildlife-deaths study; tigers as priority; chair P. Mallikarjuna Rao; member-convener APCCF Rahul Pandey; examine deaths, habitats, anti-poaching, monitoring, forest fire, water sources; programmes for tigers, leopards, elephants; human–wildlife conflict; special report on habitat, food, corridors and community.

For forest-edge villages, conflict is not an abstract chapter; it is crop loss, fear at dusk, and sometimes a body. For the Forest Department, tiger priority is also a national scrutiny test. For the Jana Sena leader who holds the forests portfolio, the committee is a public claim that deaths will be studied rather than only mourned. Readers should treat the order and the committee design as done on 3 September, and treat any future death figures as unconfirmed until the committee’s report — not this newspaper — writes them down.

Andhra Pradesh’s forest story is often told through temple towns and film politics. This cutting keeps it on habitat, water troughs, fire lines and corridors — the unglamorous infrastructure that decides whether a tiger, a leopard or an elephant lives through the next dry season.