Protected areas, tiger reserves and eco sensitive zones

Prelims and Mains

Kaziranga National Park in Assam, on the Brahmaputra floodplain, holds the largest population of the greater one horned rhinoceros.

• It is a World Heritage Site since 1985 and a tiger reserve since 2007.
• Every monsoon the river floods the grassland and the animals move to the Karbi Anglong hills to the south.
• So the fight over Kaziranga is not about the park but about the hills beside it.
• An eco sensitive zone is notified under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, which lets the Centre restrict activity on land outside a park's boundary.
• Its width is fixed park by park in its own notification, so the ten kilometre figure in the guidelines is a starting point to be argued over rather than a rule.

Prelims and Mains

Manas National Park and Tiger Reserve lies in Assam on the Bhutan border.

• It is a World Heritage Site, a biosphere reserve and an elephant reserve, and is known for the pygmy hog, the hispid hare and the golden langur.
• It falls within the Bodoland Territorial Region, run under the Sixth Schedule by the Bodoland Territorial Council, which is why orders on the park name the Council beside the State.
• A tiger reserve's core is the strictly protected inner zone kept free of human use, with a buffer of shared use around it.

Prelims

Nagarjunasagar Srisailam is India's largest tiger reserve, in the Nallamala hills of the Eastern Ghats across Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.

• It lies along the Krishna and holds the country's largest critical tiger habitat.
• An anti poaching base camp is a forest outpost inside a protected area from which staff patrol against poachers.
• The density of camps is the measure the National Tiger Conservation Authority uses for protection on the ground.

Prelims and Mains

A mining buffer is a belt around a protected area inside which mining needs prior approval.

• Unlike a national park or a sanctuary, a conservation reserve or community reserve carries no statutory buffer zone of its own.
• The Supreme Court has been closing that gap one order at a time.
• Activity that needs clearing near such an area goes to the Standing Committee of the National Board for Wildlife, the Environment Ministry, or both.