Bengal tiger’s Assam lifeline

• The Bengal tiger is looking to Assam to help it survive a massive population erosion in one of its erstwhile strongholds.
• The plan is to relocate a male and two females from Kaziranga or Orang in Assam to Buxa Tiger Reserve in north Bengal before 2020.
• The tiger relocation project, conceived in 2016, is a collaborative effort involving the forest department, the National Tiger Conservation Authority, the Wildlife Institute of India and the Global Tiger Forum.
• The strategy of relocating tigers to repopulate dying reserves had been first tried out at Sariska in Rajasthan in 2008. Panna in Madhya Pradesh benefited from a similar initiative in 2010, followed by some other parks. But all these relocations were intra-state.
• The first inter-state relocation happened on June 21 this year, when a big cat from Kanha was shifted to Satkosia in Odisha.
• The Buxa reserve spans 760sqkm and shares its borders with Assam and Bhutan. Buxa used to have high tiger density because of its abundant prey base.

Tiger reserves of Assam:

Manas Tiger Reserve

• Manas National Park is situated on the foothills of the Himalayas and a part of it extends to Bhutan. It was declared a sanctuary on October 01, 1928 and was designated a World Heritage site in December 1985. The sanctuary is home to a great variety of wildlife, including tiger, Golden Langur, Wild Buffalo etc.

Nameri Tiger Reserve

• Nameri National Park is a national park located in the foothills of the Eastern Himalayas in the Sonitpur District of Assam, India, about 35 kilometres from Tezpur. Nameri shares its northern boundary with the Pakhui Wildlife Sanctuary of Arunachal.Together they constitute an area of over 1000 km2.

Kaziranga Tiger Reserve

• Located on the banks of the mighty Brahmaputra River in the far North East of India, Assam, Kaziranga National Park covers an area of approximately 430-sq-kms with its swamps and tall thickets of elephant grass making it the ideal habitat for the Indian One-Horned Rhino.

Orang Tiger Reserve:

• Orang, the tiger reserve in Assam with the smallest core among 50 nationally protected areas, has presented wildlife scientists doing a census with a surprise: a high density of 28 big cats.
• The count was revealed during phase IV of the all-India tiger estimation programme of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA).

By: Ziyaur Rahman