IWN Report — Friday, 11 September 2026
Gujarat marked National Forest Martyrs’ Day on Friday by handing ₹50 lakh to the family of Vikas Desai, the Vyara range forest officer killed in July while chasing down a truck loaded with stolen timber.
Desai and forest guard Rehan Gamit had flagged down a vehicle near the Songadh check-post in Tapi district in the pre-dawn hours of 20 July, acting on a tip about illegal logging. The driver sped off instead of stopping. Both officers gave chase, and the collision with a container truck parked on the roadside killed them both instantly.
The ceremony took place at the state’s Vanpal Memorial in Gandhinagar, where senior state officials laid flowers and observed two minutes of silence with Gujarat’s forest staff before meeting Desai’s family. The day has been marked every 11 September since India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change created the observance in 2013.
Beyond Gujarat
Similar ceremonies took place across the country. At Kaziranga National Park in Assam, officials gathered at the park’s own Forest Martyrs’ Memorial Garden to honour 60 personnel who have died protecting the park since 1968, when poachers killed forest guard Boluram Dutta, the first name on Kaziranga’s list.
At Corbett Tiger Reserve in Uttarakhand, field director Saket Badola oversaw a similar ceremony at the reserve’s Dhangarhi campus, where park warden Binder Pal and forest ranger Lalit Arya paid tribute to the 33 Corbett personnel killed over the years by tigers, elephants and venomous snakes. Staff also donated blood in memory of their colleagues.
Assam’s state government paid tribute to the state’s forest martyrs and used the occasion to highlight Van Durga, a programme that puts women on frontline forest patrols and surveillance duty in protected areas. India’s environment ministry marked the day with a message of its own, saying it remained indebted to those who had died trying to save the country’s forests and the wildlife within them.
Deep Roots
The date commemorates the Khejarli massacre of 11 September 1730, when more than 360 members of the Bishnoi community died in a Rajasthan village trying to stop the felling of khejri trees for a maharaja’s lime kilns. Amrita Devi is said to have wrapped her arms around a tree and told the axemen a head was a cheaper price than a felled tree, a stand her daughters and, eventually, hundreds of fellow villagers repeated until the felling stopped. The Indian government made 11 September a national day of remembrance for forest personnel in 2013.
Forest personnel keep dying in these confrontations, and not only in Gujarat. In April, forest guard Harkesh Gurjar was run over and killed near Morena in Madhya Pradesh while trying to stop a tractor-trolley smuggling sand out of the Chambal river, according to the Wildlife Conservation Trust, which works in the area. The National Chambal Sanctuary he was protecting is home to gharials and Gangetic river dolphins found almost nowhere else in India, and the Trust says his death fits a long pattern of forest staff being attacked while confronting the sand and stone mining trade.
Sources: LatestLY · ETV Bharat · CMO Gujarat · Assam Tribune · Pioneer Edge · Punjab Kesari · ENewsTime · Press statement, Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change · Press Information Bureau · Wildlife Conservation Trust