Marking a major milestone in wildlife conservation, the first tigress under the Tiger Reintroduction Programme was released into Buxa Tiger Reserve on Friday.
The tigress, identified as T138, was brought from Bihar’s Valmiki Tiger Reserve as part of efforts to restore a viable tiger population in the reserve.
Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav and West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari attended the reintroduction event along with senior officials.
According to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, the initiative coincides with the start of Wildlife Week 2026 and is aimed at reviving Buxa’s historic status as an important tiger landscape.
In a social media post, Yadav said T138 had been successfully relocated from Valmiki Tiger Reserve to Buxa, and thanked the governments of Bihar and West Bengal for their support.
Declared a Tiger Reserve in 1983, Buxa forms part of a larger ecological landscape connected to forests in Bhutan and Assam. However, habitat degradation, fragmentation and declining prey availability led to the disappearance of a stable resident tiger population over the years.
Since 2018, the Government of West Bengal, with support from the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), has implemented the Tiger Augmentation and Recovery Project to improve habitat quality, strengthen protection measures and rebuild prey populations.
As part of these efforts, more than 800 chital have been released into the reserve, while around 380 hectares of grassland have been restored over the past eight years.
The release of T138 marks the beginning of Buxa’s long-term tiger recovery programme and a significant step towards restoring the reserve’s ecological balance.
