India's National Parks

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India's first wildlife park, Jim Corbett National Park, was formed in 1936. Once a popular hunting ground among the British, the park was named in honor of the late Jim Corbett, a legendary hunter-naturalist turned author and photographer who helped in demarcating the park's boundaries.Today India has dozens of national parks and hundreds of wildlife sanctuaries. The preserves are committed to maintaining the delicate ecosystems necessary to ensure the survival of both flora and fauna.

India's national parks teem with an astounding variety of animal and plant life. Ranthambor encompasses nearly 152 square miles of dry deciduous forest in southwestern Rajasthan, where the landscape is dotted with ancient banyan trees, dhok and pipal trees, clusters of mango trees and and evergreens. The diversity of flora there includes 300 trees and 50 aquatic plants.

As for fauna, India's parks play an enormously significant role in the protection of India's wild animals, including its tiger population. The parks provide a safe haven for tigers, which outside the parks are forced to compete with about 100 million humans who make their livelihood from India's forests. Indian tigers were once threatened by the shooting safaris of the Maharajas and British colonists, but today an even greater threat is posed by the demand for tiger bones and other body parts demanded by the practitioners of"traditional" medicine in certain regions of Asia.

India's parks protect other species of wildlife, too. For example, Little Rann of Kutch, Gujarat, situated in the Thar Desert, is a sanctuary for the last population of Indian wild ass, and India's greatest bird sanctuary can be found in Keoladeo Ghana National Park, more commonly known by its old name, Bharatpur. Formerly the shooting preserve of the Maharaja of Bharatpur, where in 1938 the Viceroy of India's party shot 4,273 birds in one day, today the park protects 3,000 species of bird.

Some of the rarest wildlife on the planet can be found in India's national parks, such as the golden langur, the world's rarest monkey. Golden langurs can be found only in a small patch of forest on the Manas River, which forms the border between the Manas Wildlife Sanctuary in Bhutan and the Manas National Park in India. Gir Forest holds the last surviving population of Asiatic lion in the world, and Kaziranga National Park in Assam is home to a large population of one-horned rhinoceroses and wild buffalo. For those eager to observe elephants, Bandipur, in the shadow of the Western Ghats, is one of the finest habitats of the Asian elephant.

The parks also are rich in history. For example, at Bandhavgarh National Park, set among the Vindhya Hills of Madhya Pradesh, caves dug into the sandstone of an ancient fort have inscriptions dating from the 1st century BC. Ranthambor derives its name from the fort of Ranthambor, which sits on a rocky outcrop in the forest and dates to the 11th century, when it was a vital citadel for the control of central India. Madhya Pradesh's forests were immortalized by Rudyard Kipling in his Jungle Books.

Special thanks to Nina Rao of Rare Earth Explorations for contributions on India's parks.