World Rhino Day focus on India-Bhutan joint conservation

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An Indian rhinoceros, also known as the greater one-horned rhinoceros, at Pobitora Wildlife Sanctuary on World Rhino Day, in Morigaon district, Assam, on September 22, 2026. | Photo Credit: PTI

Twenty years ago, western Assam’s Manas National Park and Tiger Reserve had no one-horned rhinos. A reintroduction programme begun in 2006 helped its number increase to almost 50 today, but it has brought a new conservation challenge — the park’s rhinos going international.

The national park authorities marked World Rhino Day on Tuesday (September 22, 2026) by celebrating the herbivore’s “comeback” and three successive years of zero poaching. Rhino specialists, however, called for a policy shift by making Bhutan a conservation partner.

“According to the 2022 census, Manas has an estimated 48 rhinos, although some died and a few were born during these four years. We have a much better environment today because the local stakeholders want more rhinos, which they say draw more tourists than other animals, including the tiger,” Deba Kumar Dutta, a frontline conservation scientist associated with the rhino translocation programme, said.

“Manas National Park has the capacity to carry more rhinos, but some of the ones thriving today are frequently crossing over to Bhutan. This warrants a joint conservation mechanism between the two countries, he told The Hindu.

The 2,837 sq. km Manas Tiger Reserve, which has the 500 sq. km Manas National Park at its core, adjoins the 1,057 sq. km Royal Manas National Park in Bhutan. The tiger reserve is in the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC)-administered Bodoland Territorial Region.

Forest officials in Assam agreed that India and Bhutan need to expand their friendly relations for the joint conservation of rhinos, tigers, elephants, and the entire fragile transboundary Manas landscape. They underscored the scope for people-to-people conservation efforts apart from a bilateral approach.

Additional Chief Conservator of Forests and the BTC’s Council Head of the (Forest) Department, Sonali Ghosh, credited Manas’s “rhino comeback story” to the people living on the fringes of the tiger reserve. “A breeding, self-sustaining population of rhinos in Manas is proof that community-led conservation works,” she said after the World Rhino Day celebration in the national park’s Bhuyanpara Range.

Extremism-driven civil unrest and poaching, primarily to trade horns for arms, wiped out Manas’s historic population of about 100 rhinos between the late 1980s and the early 2000s.

An initiative under the Indian Rhino Vision 2020 saw 22 rhinos being moved to Manas from Kaziranga National Park and Pobitora Wildlife Sanctuary between 2006 and 2021. The translocation during this period also involved 20 orphaned rhinos released from the Centre for Wildlife and Rehabilitation Centre near Kaziranga.

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