IWN Report — Tuesday, 25 August 2026

The Guwahati-based conservation group Aaranyak has weighed in on the fight over how large a protective buffer should surround Kaziranga National Park, as Assam moves to shrink the zone from its current 10 kilometres down to as little as one. Aaranyak’s position, published this week, argues the boundary should be shaped by ecology and law rather than picked as a round number.

The push has been building since Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma announced on 8 August, during a visit to Bokakhat, that the state would ask the Centre for the reduction. Sarma said the wider buffer was holding up development in towns such as Bokakhat and Kaliabor, and pointed to Supreme Court guidance permitting a minimum width of one kilometre. Environmentalists pushed back almost immediately, warning that a narrower buffer could squeeze the grasslands and floodplain habitat that keep Kaziranga’s greater one-horned rhinoceros and Bengal tigers fed and safe.

Aaranyak’s position doesn’t argue for the widest possible zone, or the narrowest. Instead, it points to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change’s 2011 guidelines, which describe eco-sensitive zones as “shock absorbers” around protected areas — meant to regulate activity rather than prohibit it outright — and which explicitly allow the width to vary with local ecology and geography. The Supreme Court weighed in too, in its judgment of 17 November 2025 in the Corbett case, ruling that a tiger reserve’s eco-sensitive zone must at minimum cover its buffer and fringe areas, with a one-kilometre cushion filled in wherever that buffer runs out or doesn’t exist.

The organisation lists what it considers non-negotiable on the ground. Top of that list are the nine wildlife corridors the Assam government has itself notified between Kaziranga and the Karbi Anglong hills to the south, which Aaranyak says must be protected in full rather than trimmed to fit a smaller boundary. As a floodplain park, Kaziranga’s animals also need protected routes to higher ground when the Brahmaputra rises, and those escape routes fall outside the park as often as inside it. Wetlands, streams, and the shifting chars and chaporis of the northern riverine landscape round out the list.

Local Stakes

Aaranyak is equally insistent that the process shouldn’t run over the people who live in the landscape. A Community Livelihood and Sustainable Development Plan should be published alongside the zone notification, the organisation argues, covering everything from tourism and homestays to human-elephant conflict response. The proposed boundary, maps and criteria should be made public before anything is finalised too — translated into Assamese, Karbi, Bodo, Hindi and Nepali, and taken to Gram Panchayats and the Karbi Anglong Autonomous Council for consultation. Aaranyak has also offered to share its ecological data and technical expertise with the Assam government free of charge.

Kaziranga was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1985. Aaranyak notes that it has no formal buffer zone recorded under that convention at all.

Sources: Aaranyak · India Today NE · Supreme Court Observer · MoEFCC · UNESCO World Heritage