Assam Floods: How 2,400 rhinos in Kaziranga are fleeing for their lives

BAGORI, ASSAM: It was 1 pm on Tuesday. The Haldibari forest camp at Kaziranga National Park (KNP) received an alert that a baby rhino was battling for life in floodwaters a kilometre away. The six month-old calf was making its way through the nearby Mora Diphlu rivulet but became too fatigued to climb the highland. “Urgent rescue needed,” the message said.
In no time, five guards jumped into a country boat moored behind the camp and rushed to the spot. The National Highway 37 that passes through the park, which would have shortened the journey by 5-10 minutes, was heavily flooded and closed for vehicular movement. The forest camp, incidentally, did not have any of the 11 speed boats that the forest department at KNP owns to guard 884 sq km of the park spread across land and water bodies.

An hour later, the men returned, dejected. They carried back the rhino calf, but it was dead. The guards — Dipak, Binod, Kosheshwar, Tapan and Khireswar — struggled to bring the heavy baby animal out of the boat. “Moi gad puwali morile chabo nowaro oi (I can’t see the sight of a dead baby rhino),” said Tapan Teron, choking back his tears and digging the ground to bury the little beast.



During the past one week, as floods hit Kaziranga, submerging 90% of its landmass, animals are scrambling for a patch of dry ground. They are swimming through swirling floodwaters for miles — and at times drowning out of sheer exhaustion — and they are clambering up hills and highlands in a mad dash to survive.

According to data available with the KNP Directorate, 12 one-horned rhinoceroses, including the one at Haldibari, have died so far. While 11 of them drowned, the twelfth, trying to escape the floodplains, fell to its death after it slipped from the nearby Karbi Anglong hills. The forest department struggled for five hours to pull the rhino out from between two boulders, but the mission failed. They succeeded, though, in sending a younger, accompanying rhino to a safe zone using two trained elephants and their mahouts.



The forest department has so far rescued two rhinos, which are under observation in its rehabilitation and conservation centre. Altogether, 60 animals, including elephants, hog deer and wild boars, were rescued even as 141 died in the floods. The foresters tie the legs and cover the eyes of the animals they rescue so as to minimise the shock level.

Take the Rhino by its horns
For three consecutive days, ET Magazine crisscrossed Kaziranga National Park and witnessed a number of interventions where foresters either rescued animals or prodded them to a safer path. In one such incident at Sildubi in the Bagori range on Wednesday, a three-year-old rhino swam several kilometres through floodwaters to reach the highway.

The foresters and the nearby villagers monitored its movement for 17 hours and prevented it from entering human settlement, thus averting a possible commotion and threat to human life and property. Forest guards contemplated using tranquillisers to tame the animal, for which they would have had to take permission from higher authorities, but the plan was abandoned as the rhino was worn out, a condition in which darting could prove fatal. At 8 pm, the animal finally started swimming to a highland, and the guards and villagers heaved a sigh of relief.



KNP has 140 artificial highlands, each spread across 1.5 hectares and at a height of four to five metres. Thirty-three of these highlands were built in 2016.

While most of the animals which died in the past one week had drowned, 16 were hit by vehicles as they tried to cross the road to safety. After all, 49 kilometres of NH 37 — which carry up to 6,000 vehicles a day — pass through the KNP. During
floods, animals move southward from the Brahmaputra Valley to the Karbi Anglong hills, perilously crossing the highway.

P Sivakumar, director of Kaziranga National Park, told ET Magazine that foresters issue electronic time cards during monsoons to restrict the speed of vehicles to 40 km per hour.

"That solves the problem only partly. The real hazard comes from trucks that ply after 6 pm, when animals cross the road," he says, adding that the government has almost finalised a Rs 2,500 crore mega plan to construct a three-lane elevated flyway totalling 35 km. At present, there are nine animal corridors in that stretch where vehicles need to slow down.

The problem is compounded because two lakh people are settled in and around these corridors, leading to regular man-animal conflicts. Some residents even feel jealous of the rhino as the animal gets all the attention from the government. "We are humans. But the government is more interested in animals. The rhinos have a better life than us," says 72-year-old farmer Manik Bhuyan.

Floods in Assam have so far killed 37 people and directly impacted 57 lakh people in 33 districts. Bhuyan, a resident of Baghmari village near KNP, has also taken shelter along the highway.

Bhuyan's emotional outburst is understandable, but the reality is that the raison d'etre of Kaziranga as a World Heritage Site is the one-horned Indian rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis), considered highly vulnerable and listed in the red list of threatened species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

In 2018-19, as many as 1.76 lakh tourists, including 7,443 foreigners, visited KNP, the main attraction being the rhino. The conservation of rhinos in Kaziranga has been a success story: their numbers have grown from a paltry 366 in 1966 to 2,413 in 2018 when the last census was conducted.


KNP also has 1,089 elephants, 1,937 wild buffaloes, 907 swamp deer and 104 tigers. It is home to 15 species of mammals that are considered threatened under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972.

Located on a floodplain in the southern part of the Brahmaputra, Kaziranga was declared a reserve forest in 1908, shortly after a visit by Lady Curzon, wife of the then Viceroy Lord Curzon. As legend goes, Lady Curzon was mesmerised by the sight of the onehorned animal and impressed upon her husband the need to take initiatives for its conservation. Later, in 1950, Kaziranga was named as a wildlife sanctuary and in 1974 it was upgraded to a national park. In 2007, it was declared a tiger reserve as it was argued that the park would be a better habitat with tigers in it. Many conservationists believe that a sanctuary without tigers makes other animals lazy and less productive.

On Thursday, an adult royal Bengal tiger took refuge on a bed in a house in Harmoti area, indicating how the floods have not spared even the big cats. The video of the tiger went viral after the Wildlife Trust of India posted it on social media platforms. Floods in Kaziranga affect its 35 mammal species as well as many types of snakes, turtles, lizards and insects. It is also the time when poachers prowl - in the chaos wreaked by the natural disaster, they try to collect the horns of dead rhinos.

The rhino horn is believed to have medicinal values and is even sold as an aphrodisiac. A horn weighing one kilogram fetches Rs 80 lakh for local poachers, says a senior forest official. The horn is then smuggled to China via Dimapur (Nagaland), Churachandpur (Manipur) and Myanmar. Pasighat in Arunachal Pradesh has of late become a new transit hub before the materials get smuggled into China where one kilogram may fetch a whopping Rs 3 crore. Rhino horn is also used as an ornament and gift in parts of China and Vietnam.


Kumar Sanjay Krishna, additional chief secretary in-charge of home and disaster management of the government of Assam, says the police is on high alert.

"We have alerted the police and forest officials that poachers may take advantage of the floods. The animals have now taken shelter in a few highlands and also in the Karbi Anglong hills," he says.

There have been 144 poaching incidents in KNP since 2007 for which data is readily available, the worst years being 2013 and 2014. In both those years, 27 poaching incidents were recorded. During the last 12 years, the best has been 2011 when only three such incidents took place. Three rhinos have been poached so far in the current calendar year.

The danger during the floods is that if the poachers come to know about the death of a rhino ahead of the forest department, there is a fair chance that the horn would fall into the wrong hands. On Tuesday, as this writer was sitting in a forest department office at Bagori, an alert came that an adult rhino was found dead. In no time, ranger Pankaj Bora took a speed boat and recovered the horn of the dead animal.

"We need to follow a strict procedure. We first take the weight of the raw horn. It will be weighed again after a few weeks when it is dry. The horn will finally be preserved in the treasury," Bora explains.

In fact, 1,300 rhino horns are currently in the possession of the government of Assam, raising questions on whether it should continue to pile up the inventory. In 2016, it was almost decided to destroy the collection, but a controversy erupted around the genuineness of many of these horns, forcing the authorities to again authenticate them.

"My view is that we must destroy this inventory of rhino horns someday. We should be proud of our live rhinos, not of the horns kept in treasuries. But that's something I can't take a call on," says Sivakumar. For now, across the floodwaters, he and the foresters are keeping a weather eye out for the real treasures of Kaziranga - the rhinos - to ensure that these majestic beasts are not in trouble.