IWN Original Report — Thursday, 7 May 2026

Kanha’s meadows did not maintain themselves.

Behind the barasingha’s remarkable recovery — from 66 individuals in 1967 to over 1,000 today — was decades of relentless, unglamorous work by the park’s own staff. Weeds cleared by hand. Artificial swamps dug and maintained. Invasive species removed season after season. Boma enclosures built and managed. The grasslands that made Kanha famous, and that gave the barasingha enough room to come back from the edge, were not simply there. They were made, and kept, by people.

Four animals that arrived at Kanha’s Supkhar enclosure on 28 April from Kaziranga National Park suggest a different possibility — one that runs on hooves rather than human labour.

What a buffalo does to a grassland

The Asiatic wild water buffalo (Bubalus arnee) is what ecologists call a keystone megaherbivore. Its impact on grassland is structural, not incidental. Where a chital or a barasingha grazes selectively — taking what suits it and moving on — a wild buffalo works systematically through tall, mature, dense grass that has grown beyond the reach of smaller species. It breaks that grass down. It creates clearings. It opens the mosaic of short and medium sward that ground-nesting birds, smaller herbivores, and the barasingha itself depend on.

Across the grassland landscapes where wild buffaloes were historically present — the Terai, the Brahmaputra floodplains, the open meadows of central India — this engineering function was simply part of how the ecosystem worked. No one managed it. No one needed to.

When the buffalo disappeared from Kanha, probably sometime around 1979 — the last confirmed sighting on record — that function disappeared with it. The grassland did not collapse. Kanha’s staff filled the gap. But filling it required continuous intervention: resources, personnel, and institutional commitment that not every protected area in India can sustain.

The 99 per cent problem

The buffalo’s absence from Kanha was not an isolated local extinction. It was part of a broader collapse. The Wildlife Trust of India, which has been running the Central India Wild Buffalo Recovery Project for years, estimates that fewer than 4,000 wild buffaloes survive globally. Of those, approximately 99 per cent live in Assam — the overwhelming majority of them in Kaziranga alone.

That concentration is not a conservation success. It is a conservation emergency wearing the clothes of one. A single catastrophic event in Assam — a severe flooding year, an epidemic, a disease outbreak of the kind that cut through Kaziranga’s rhinos in 1993 — and the species’ global wild population faces a blow it may not recover from.

The Wildlife Institute of India conducted the feasibility assessment that identified Kanha as a viable destination for reintroduction — its open meadow system ecologically comparable to Kaziranga’s floodplain grasslands, its prey base and protection status sufficient to support a new population. What that assessment confirmed, in scientific terms, is something Kanha’s forest managers already knew from decades of experience: the grassland is there. What’s been missing is the animal that should be living in it.

The thread IWN has been following

Earlier this year, IWN wrote about the barasingha’s recovery at Kanha — how 66 animals became 1,000 through one of India’s most sustained conservation efforts. We wrote about India’s grasslands being classified as wasteland by a colonial-era land revenue system that has never been properly reformed, leaving the open ecosystems that species like the barasingha, the blackbuck, the Great Indian Bustard, and the cheetah depend on without legal protection comparable to what forests enjoy.

The wild buffalo sits at the intersection of both those stories. It needs the grassland. It also makes the grassland. Its return to Kanha is not only a species reintroduction — it is the restoration of an ecological process that has been running on human substitutes for nearly five decades.

Fifteen buffaloes are planned for this first phase. The full programme, overseen jointly by the Assam and Madhya Pradesh forest departments with WTI’s support, targets 50 animals over the coming year. The four currently in the soft-release enclosure at Supkhar — one male, three females — will adapt gradually before being released into the meadows proper.

What comes next is the hard part

The translocation itself is the easy part to celebrate. What determines whether this becomes a genuine ecological restoration or a well-intentioned addition to the park’s megafauna count is what happens in the grassland over the next decade.

Do the buffaloes breed? Does their grazing pattern begin to alter the structure of the grass communities in measurable ways? Do barasingha numbers in areas where buffalo are present differ from areas where they are not? These are questions that WII’s monitoring programme will need to answer — and that will take years, not months.

Kanha’s grassland managers did not get the barasingha back in a season. They got it back over fifty years of work that most people never saw. The buffalo’s return is, at best, the beginning of a process that operates on the same timescale — one that, if it works, will mean the grassland no longer needs quite so much help.

Sources: Wildlife Trust of India — Wild Buffalo Recovery Project · Wildlife Institute of India · NTCA — Kanha Tiger Reserve · Kaziranga National Park and Tiger Reserve · MP Forest Department