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.
“Manas National Park has the capacity to carry more rhinos, but some of the ones thriving today are frequently crossing over to Bhutan. Rhino specialists, however, called for a policy shift by making Bhutan a conservation partner. 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.
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, we have a much better environment today. “According to the 2022 census, Manas has an estimated 48 rhinos, although some died and a few were born during these four years.
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. This warrants a joint conservation mechanism between the two countries, he told The Hindu. 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.
