Assam: ‘No reduction in Kaziranga ESZ without scientific study’, says Balipara Foundation

Guwahati: The Balipara Foundation, a non-profit organization that focuses on community-led ecological conservation and habitat restoration in the Eastern Himalayas, on Thursday called for an independent, science-based study to determine the width of the Eco-Sensitive Zone (ESZ) around Kaziranga National Park and Tiger Reserve before any decision is taken to reduce the buffer to 1 km.

Kaziranga does not yet have a final, site-specific ESZ notified. In its absence, the Supreme Court’s June 2022 order applies a default buffer of 10 km around protected areas nationally, and the Gauhati High Court reaffirmed as recently as March 2026 that this default continues to govern Kaziranga.

According to the foundation, reducing the buffer from 10 km to 1 km would remove roughly nine-tenths of the surrounding protected land, as the area of such a ring scales with its depth along the park’s entire boundary.

The Assam government’s proposal to reduce the ESZ has been made with the stated aim of easing restrictions on development in surrounding towns, including a proposed stadium at Bokakhat. The foundation said no formal proposal has yet been sent to the Centre and that any future draft notification would go through a public consultation process. It said it was placing its concerns on record before the proposal is finalised.

The foundation said construction, traffic and tourism-related pressure is already visible around Jakhalabandha, Kohora, Bagori, Bokakhat, Uthori, Sekoni, Hatikhuli and Methoni, even ahead of any formal change to the ESZ. It said this points to pressure on the park’s edge intensifying further in the absence of a clear, scientifically grounded buffer policy.

In some places, notably around Sekoni and Bokakhat town, built-up development already stands at less than 1 km from the park boundary, the foundation said. It added that this existing shortfall should be studied and, where necessary, regularised or mitigated, rather than used as a precedent for reducing protection along the rest of the boundary.

The foundation clarified that its concern is with unregulated or unplanned activity within the buffer, including construction of hotels, resorts and commercial establishments, conversion of agricultural or forest land for real estate, quarrying and mining, and unmanaged tourism infrastructure, traffic and waste generation that fragments wildlife corridors. It said this does not extend to essential public infrastructure such as roads, schools, health facilities, or the wildlife-friendly highway works already underway.

Kaziranga is bounded on one side by the Brahmaputra, leaving the park’s wildlife with no room to retreat northward. Its only outlet for seasonal movement lies to the south, through nine recognised wildlife corridors crossing NH-715 (formerly NH-37) into the Karbi Anglong hills — Panbari, Haldibari, Amguri, Kanchanjuri, Deosur, Bagori, Harmati, Hatidandi and Chirang.

During the annual monsoon floods, rhinos, elephants, wild buffalo and deer depend entirely on these southern corridors to reach higher ground, the foundation said.

An ESZ also keeps domestic livestock and free-ranging village animals at a distance from wild herds, reducing the risk of disease transmission between the two, it said, citing Africa’s experience with rinderpest, a cattle disease that repeatedly devastated wild buffalo and wildebeest across the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem before being declared eradicated worldwide in 2011. A narrower ESZ would increase points of contact between Kaziranga’s wild herds and domestic cattle along its edge, the foundation said.

Kaziranga was first declared a reserve forest in 1905, when as few as a dozen rhinos were believed to have survived in the area. Since then, its wildlife numbers have grown substantially. Its rhino population rose from 1,552 in 1999 to 2,613 in the 2022 census, nearly two-thirds of the world’s wild population. Its elephants now number over 1,200, tigers grew from 104 in 2022 to 148 in the 2024 tiger census, and its wild water buffalo, at over 2,500, form the largest population on Earth.

The park is also recognised as an Important Bird Area (IBA) with 479 recorded species, and its wetlands host over 20,000 waterbirds during peak season.

Grasslands cover roughly 57 per cent of Kaziranga — 52 per cent tall grass and 5 per cent short grass and marsh, with wetlands covering a further 7 per cent, the foundation said. It added that a larger wildlife population needs proportionately more grass, water and grazing land to sustain itself, not less.

The foundation said the human population on Kaziranga’s southern, Golaghat-side periphery had grown just as sharply over the same period. Golaghat town, recorded at a little over 2,000 residents in the early 1910s, had grown to roughly 42,000 by the 2011 census. Golaghat district as a whole, of which Bokakhat subdivision forms a part, had crossed one million residents (1,066,888) by 2011, while Bokakhat subdivision alone recorded over 145,000 residents by the 2011 census.

The foundation said a buffer policy needed to weigh both trends together, rather than being decided in isolation from either.

It also sought a dedicated scientific study into Kaziranga’s ecological carrying capacity — the maximum wildlife population its grasslands, wetlands and water resources can sustainably support, and how that ceiling shifts with rainfall, temperature and flood patterns.

The foundation said published rhino-habitat research on Kaziranga had noted the absence of a detailed suitability map or known carrying-capacity values for the park, even as census officials had separately suggested that slowing growth in recent rhino counts could be an early sign that parts of the park are approaching that ceiling.

Such a study, the foundation said, should explicitly model flood behaviour in the Brahmaputra valley and assess connectivity with the wider protected-area network along the valley, including Kaziranga’s Sixth Addition on the Sonitpur/Biswanath side, and the corridor linking Kaziranga to the Laokhowa and Burachapori Wildlife Sanctuaries, Orang National Park and Pobitora Wildlife Sanctuary.

The foundation cited Nepal’s Chitwan National Park, where a 1996 Buffer Zone Policy shares 30-50 per cent of park revenue with surrounding communities and gives them a formal role in managing the buffer forest. The model, along with strict anti-poaching enforcement, was credited with helping Chitwan’s rhino and tiger populations recover over subsequent decades.

It also cited Thailand’s Dong Phayayen-Khao Yai Forest Complex, where a national highway was built through the landscape without a clear external buffer, leading to encroachment and disrupted wildlife movement that required a US 40 million dollar wildlife corridor retrofit, completed in 2019.

The foundation recommended commissioning an independent, landscape-level scientific study of the ESZ, with a committee constituted within 90 days, to determine appropriate buffer widths for Kaziranga and other important forest landscapes in Assam. It also recommended a dedicated carrying-capacity study for Kaziranga modelling weather, climate and flood patterns and assessing connectivity to Laokhowa, Burachapori, Orang and Pobitora.

Other recommendations include maintaining the existing 10-km buffer as an interim measure pending that study, rather than reducing it administratively; formally assessing locations such as Sekoni and Bokakhat town where development already stands within 1 km of the boundary; enforcing clear laws on solid waste and greywater management around the park’s periphery, particularly in the Kohora area; protecting water bodies within 25 km of the park; halting unregulated quarrying in and around the ESZ; and adopting a published tourism and development policy that includes community- and village-based tourism, dignified rehabilitation where relocation is necessary, and new infrastructure sited 25-50 km from the most sensitive areas.