It is nearing 6 pm at the Jaldapara National Park. The grassland is harsh and beautiful, painted in shades of yellow and green. On the small wooden bridge over a tributary of the Torsa river, forest guards Rajakanta Bunta Burman and Paresh Burman are cycling to get to the tower in the core area. Paresh has a double-barrel gun slung over his shoulder. They work 12-hour shifts and have to get to the tower by 6 pm to sign the duty register.
Rajakanta, 45, hops off his bicycle to talk. "I joined the department in 1983. That was when poaching was at its worst. We lost 22 rhinos over the next one year. The poachers used to come in groups and had sophisticated weapons such as AK-47s. But gradually, things began changing. We were trained to use weapons and forest guards patrolled round the clock. Since then, the number of rhinos kept going up and now there are almost 200 of them," says Burman.
The Jaldapara sanctuary, with its tall elephant grass, is spread across 216.43 sq km in Jalpaiguri district of West Bengal. The park was established in 1941 to protect the one-horned rhinoceros and today, has the largest rhino population in India after Kaziranga National Park in Assam (which incidentally is battling poaching). But the one-horned armoured toughie didn't always roam free in Jaldapara.
According to the 2012 annual report of the state Forest Department, 75 rhinos were reported and recorded in Jaldapara sanctuary in 1969. However, over the next two decades, the number of rhinos dropped drastically, till it reached 14 in 1986. Senior forest officers in Kolkata admit the actual numbers might have been even lower—about eight to 10.
But the dire situation in the eighties worked as a trigger for a group of senior forest officers in Kolkata and Jaldapara to devise a survival strategy to save the rhino. The experiment worked and over the years, the rhino population went up. The Jaldapara experiment is now one of the finest success stories in wildlife conservation. In May 2012, the sanctuary was declared a national park.
