Kanha Tiger Reserve


Kanha Tiger Reserve, also known as Kanha–Kisli National Park, is one of the tiger reserves of India and the largest national park of the state of Madhya Pradesh. The present-day Kanha area is divided into two sanctuaries, Hallon and Banjar, of, respectively. Kanha National Park was created on 1 June 1955 and was designated a tiger reserve in 1973. Today, it encompasses an area of in the two districts Mandla and Balaghat.
Together with a surrounding buffer zone of and the neighbouring
Phen Sanctuary, it forms the Kanha Tiger Reserve, which is one of the biggest in the country. This makes it the largest national park in central India.
The park has a significant population of royal Bengal tigers, Indian leopards, sloth bears, barasinghas and Indian wild dogs. The forest depicted in The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling is based on jungles including this reserve. It is also the first tiger reserve in India to officially introduce a mascot, Bhoorsingh the Barasingha.

Flora

Kanha Tiger Reserve is home to over 1000 species of flowering plants. The lowland forest is a mixture of sal and other mixed-forest trees, interspersed with meadows. The highland forests are tropical moist, dry deciduous type and of a completely different nature from bamboo on slopes. A notable Indian ghost tree can also be seen in the dense forest.

Fauna

Kanha Tiger Reserve has species of tigers, leopards, wild dogs, wild cats, foxes and jackals. Among the deer species, swamp deer or hard-ground barasingha is the pride of the place, as it is the only subspecies of swamp deer in India, except the great swamp deer of Sundarbans. The animal is adapted to hard ground unlike swamp deer of the north, which live in marshy swamps. The reserve has been instrumental in rescuing the swamp deer from extinction. Indian gaur, belonging to the ox genus, are found in Kanha, but seen mostly as winter ends. In summer, gaur inhabit meadows and waterholes in the park.
Other commonly seen animals in the park include the spotted deer, sambar, barking deer, and the four-horned antelope. The latter can be seen at Bamni Dadar climb. Recently, mouse deer have also been discovered in the tiger reserve.
Blackbuck have inexplicably become very rare. They vanished completely, but have been reintroduced recently inside a fenced area in the park. Nilgai can still be seen near the Sarahi Gate, while the Indian wolf once commonly seen at Mocha is a rare sight now. Striped hyena and sloth bear are seen occasionally. Langurs and wild boars are common, but the pugnacious rhesus macaque is seen less often.
Nocturnal animals like fox, hyena, jungle cat, civets, porcupine, ratel or honey badger, and hares can be seen outside the park confines.
The reserve brings around 300 species of birds and the most commonly seen birds are the black ibis, bee-eaters, cattle egret, blossom-headed parakeets, pond herons, drongos, common teal, crested serpent eagle, grey hornbill, Indian roller, lesser adjutant, little grebes, lesser whistling teal, minivets, Malabar pied hornbill, woodpeckers, pigeon, paradise flycatchers, mynas, Indian peafowl, red junglefowl, red-wattled lapwing, steppe eagle, Tickell's blue flycatcher, white-eyed buzzard, white-breasted kingfisher, white-browed fantail, wood shrikes, and warblers, vultures among many more.
Reptiles such as Indian pythons, Indian cobras, krait, rat snakes, vipers, keelbacks, and grass snakes are nocturnal animals, so rarely are seen. Many species of turtles and amphibians are found in or near the water bodies.

Reintroduction of barasingha

An exciting conservation effort in this national park is the reintroduction of barasingha. The gaur will be relocated to Bandhavgarh and some barasingha will be relocated to Satpura Tiger Reserve The objective of this project is to introduce about 500 barasingha in this national park to eight or nine different locations. There is also a project to capture about twenty tigers and relocate them to Satpura Tiger Reserve.

Tiger conservation and the Baiga tribe

Members of the Baiga tribe, a semi-nomadic tribe of central India that is reliant on the forest, lived in 28 villages that had been within the Kanha National Park until 1968, when they were relocated. The relocation was part of an effort to maintain a critical tiger habitat. The land to which they were relocated is barren and they now suffer from alcoholism and malnourishment, and beg to support themselves. The last of the villages to be relocated for the tiger habitat is in the core zone of the Kanha Tiger Reserve. The area is the ancestral home of the Gond and Baiga tribes.
In January 2010, Baiga tribe were illegally evicted from the park without proper compensation from the government, according to Survival International.
In its efforts to maintain and restore tiger habitats, WWF-India has worked to create corridors that support the tigers and their prey, thereby stabilizing the tiger population. This includes efforts to prevent loss of life or property of humans, reduce human dependency on the forest, and reduce retaliatory killings of tigers when people have experienced losses.
However, Kanha's frontline staff continue to receive support, training and equipment from WWF, even as they carry out the eviction of the 22,000 residents who are to be forcibly resettled from tiger reserves in the region.

General information

Kanha Tiger Reserve is:
The Jabalpur Airport / 04:30hrs) has direct flights to and from Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Pune, Belgaum and Bhopal, with AirIndia, SpiceJet and Indigo operating daily flights. Nagpur have other airports.
Jabalpur is major railway stations with train connectivity across India. From Jabalpur, the best way to travel is via Mandla, which has a tourist taxi service to the park, and one can reach up to Chiraidongri the newly added Broad Gauge station via jabalpur, Nainpur railway route to enter national park through Kanha gate. In pre-planned journey one of shortest road route is Jabalpur-Bargi Dam-Ganhsor-Thanwar Dam-Chiraidongri-Kanha National Park. Other route Jabalpur to Mandla -Chiraidongri- Kanha route is preferred when arrival permission is to be taken from National Park authority at Mandla. This National Park can also be approached from Raipur - Gandai - Malanjkhand - Baihar highway route via Mukki Gate to National Park. M.P. Tourism and Private owners has hotels, resorts near to Mukki Gate. Similar stay facilities is also available at Khatia and Kanha Gate.
There are three gates for entrance into the park. The Kanha/Kisli gate is best accessed from Jabalpur and stops at the village Khatia, inside the buffer area. The second gate is at Mukki and the third, most recently opened, gate is at Sarhi.

Ecosystem valuation

An economic assessment study of Kanha Tiger Reserve estimated that the tiger reserve provides flow benefits worth 16.5 billion rupees annually. Important ecosystem services from the tiger reserve include gene-pool protection, provisioning of water to downstream regions and provisioning of fodder in buffer areas. Other services included recreation value, provision of habitat and refugia for wildlife and sequestration of carbon.