105th National Park of India – Dehing Patkai National Park, Assam

By Udbhav Bhargava

Assam government has decided to upgrade Dehing Patkai wildlife sanctuary to national park

The park will be the 105^th entrant in the list of the 104 existing national parks in the country covering an area of approximately 40000 square kilometers, accounting for 1.23% of the total Indian geographical area. This last entry was made in 2018 when the Kuno wildlife sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh was converted into a National Park.

The erstwhile wildlife sanctuary is situated in Dibrugarh & Tinsukia districts of Assam and covers an area of 111 square kilometers. It was declared a sanctuary on 13 June 2004. The “would-be national park” is a dense evergreen rainforest, which when observed by a satellite looks like a “big dark green patch” cut into two parts by the Dehing river. The name of the park is formed by the amalgamation of names of Dehing river and the Patkai Bum hills located in the east end of the park.

Referred to as the “Amazon of the East”, this forestland stretches for 575 square kilometers in Assam. The previous sanctuary was also an elephant reserve under the Project Elephant because of concentration of Asian elephant in the evergreen forest habitat. It is a rich and unique biodiversity hotspot that is home to several rare and endangered animal species; Hoolock gibbon, sluggish loris, pig-tailed macaque, capped langur, Bengal tiger.

It, also, is home to close to 300 different bird species including Slender-billed vulture, white-winged duck, Larger spotted eagle, larger and smaller adjutant, etc. Rock python, King cobra, Asian leaf turtle, monitor lizard are the most common reptiles found in this area. Thirty different butterfly species thrive in this gorgeous tropical vegetation.

Any area other than that comprised of any reserve forest or territorial waters may be notified to constitute a sanctuary if such area is of sufficient biological, faunal, floral, geomorphological, geological or zoological importance for the purpose of preserving, spreading or cultivating wildlife or their habitat. Within the sanctuary area are permitted certain restricted human activities details of which are provided in the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972. The country has a total of 551 Wildlife Sanctuaries.

What is a National Park? An area, whether within a sanctuary or not, can be notified by the state government to be constituted as a National Park, by the same reasons as mentioned above for a wildlife sanctuary. But the distinction is made between the two by the fact that no human activity is permitted inside the national park except for the ones permitted by the Chief Wildlife Warden of the state under the conditions given in the Chapter 4 of the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972.

A political perspective can be attributed to the move as the proclamation came just months after the conditional clearance by the National Board of Wildlife (NBWL) to a Coal India Limited (CIL) coal mining project in the vicinity of the sanctuary area that triggered protests movements in the state.