Rhino hide-and-seek

Kaziranga, which began with 15 to 20 rhinos when the national park was created in the early 20th century, became home to 1,700 of them within a hundred years, and currently shelters a staggering 2,329 of these one-horned denizens — or two-thirds of the total rhino population worldwide. Bursting at its seams, it now faces a challenge its creators never envisioned.

With four rivers crisscrossing it and four major species thriving here — the rhino, Bengal tiger, Asiatic elephant and wild Indian buffalo — the 430 sq km Kaziranga National Park continues to be a tourist paradise. But there is trouble in paradise. Rhinos and tigers are multiplying rapidly, and the overcrowding is driving them into adjacent forested blocks, human habitations and tea gardens. The resulting man-animal conflicts have tragic consequences for both.

The Park also has about 1,165 wild elephants, 108 tigers (with a healthy male-female ratio, promising future growth), 1,900 wild buffaloes, 1,000 swamp deer and several hoolock gibbons, to name a few. Together, they are, quite literally, testing this sanctuary’s limits.

While there has been a wildlife explosion inside the Park and on its periphery, there has also been a mushrooming of hotels, dhabas and tourist lodges on its fringes and along the wildlife corridors leading out of it. And while any move to allocate additional areas to the Park for its burgeoning wildlife is usually met with opposition, many an outsider has bought land here, confident of good business. Of the five main animal corridors out of Kaziranga — Haldibari, Kanchanjuri, Burapahar, Panbari and Angudi — the last two are blocked by new settlements with support from human rights activists.

Over the years, there have been six additions — small chunks of a few square kilometres each — to the Park to make room for the animals. However, this is not an integrated wildlife area — it is dotted with human settlements and tea gardens, making expansion difficult. Reiterating the need for “safe passage”, recently the Gauhati High Court called for corridors that “must be provided to the wildlife at any cost, however big that cost may be.”

With numbers rising rapidly, there literally is very little space for the animals to move. During the annual floods, the animals also move towards the neighbouring district of Karbi Anglong and here, again, their passage is blocked. (As a tourist staying in a village home in Karbi last December, I heard distressing stories of elephants uprooting a home barely a few yards away and a tiger snatching cattle a little further off. Feeling insecure and hemmed in, a villager narrated his struggles to get compensation from the forest department for the loss of his cattle and the destroyed house.)

Horn of India

The Indian Rhino Vision (IRV) 2020 project — launched with international support — hopes to push the rhino numbers up to 3,000 within the next six years and disperse them into seven protected areas to safeguard against epidemics and poaching.

The first lot of rhinos was translocated from the overcrowded Pobitora to Manas in 2008. Since then, selected rhinos have been regularly translocated to developed, protected habitats. As many as 22 rhinos were moved to Manas, an excellent rhino habitat that had been destroyed during Assam’s civil strife. Orang, Laokhowa and Burhachpori are the other favoured areas. “With the dispersal, the rhinos and other wildlife will have access to nearly 2,000 sq km of grasslands,” says NK Vasu, who was the director of Kaziranga until this year.

Meanwhile, the translocated rhinos in Manas have given birth to young ones, in testimony to the success of the IRV 2020, led by Dr Bibhab Talukdar, chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Asian rhino specialist group. The project has on board the Assam Forest Department, the Bodoland Territorial Council, International Rhino Foundation, World Wide Fund for Nature - India, US Fish and Wildlife Service and the NGO Aaranyak.

A major roadblock to the rhino success story — assuming that the planned translocations will happen in good time — is the reported rise in poaching activity in the area. Vasu admits that it remains a major challenge for the Park. While the official figure for rhino poaching in 2013 is 27, the unofficial estimate is 30-plus. This year too there have been rhino deaths every month, their splendid horn yanked off mercilessly. While some poachers have been caught and the CBI is investigating half-a-dozen cases, there are also efforts to involve the locals in wildlife and forest protection. In a country where conservation efforts have rarely met with such success, hopefully, poaching and encroachment won’t eclipse a feat that’s beyond the wildest imagination of conservationists. The problem now might be one of plenty, but in some ways it is a good problem to have.

Usha Rai is a journalist who writes on development and environment issues.

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