Saving the rhino, restoring grasslands

Why in the News

The Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change has set out a shift in India’s rhino conservation strategy on World Rhino Day, September 22, from safeguarding existing concentrations of the greater one-horned rhinoceros to establishing secure populations across suitable parts of its historical range. The framework for that shift is the National Conservation Strategy for the rhinoceros, launched in 2019, which had already committed to restoring the species to suitable former habitats. The species has recovered from around 1,500 animals in the 1980s to more than 4,000 as of September 2024. The recovery now runs into a habitat problem rather than a protection problem, because the grasslands the species depends on degrade without active management.

What is the National Conservation Strategy for the rhinoceros?

1. Scope of the strategy: It provides the framework for strengthening existing rhino populations and for restoring the species to suitable former habitats.
2. Genetic and spatial security: It commits to maintaining genetic security and habitat connectivity, so separated populations do not become isolated breeding units.
3. Planned movement of animals: It promotes scientifically planned translocation, the deliberate capture and release of animals into a new site to found a population there.
4. Climate in the protection framework: It recognises climate-resilient management as part of the protection framework for the species rather than as a separate exercise.

Where does the rhino live now, and where did it once live?

1. Present distribution: The wild population in India is concentrated mainly in Assam, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.
2. Historical range: The animal’s range extended across the northern Indian Subcontinent, along the Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra river systems.
3. The two landscapes it belongs to: It is an integral part of the ecological and cultural landscape of the Brahmaputra floodplains and the Terai grasslands.
4. The strategic consequence: Conservation confined to existing concentrations leaves most of that historical range empty, which is the gap range expansion is meant to close.

What does Phase I of the range expansion commit to?

1. Duration and funding route: The five-year Phase I runs from 2026 to 2031 and is proposed for support through the National CAMPA Authority, which holds compensatory afforestation funds collected when forest land is diverted.
2. States brought together: It covers Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.
3. Named focus areas: Scientific monitoring, protection, habitat restoration and management, translocation planning, coexistence and capacity building.
4. The expansion target: Beyond consolidating existing populations, it seeks to support the species’ expansion into suitable areas in Bihar and Arunachal Pradesh.
5. The habitat instrument: The Rhino Conservation Action Plan provides for mapping grasslands and wetlands, identifying invasive species, prioritising habitats for intensive restoration and developing management protocols specific to each protected area.

Why does saving the rhino depend on how grasslands and floodplains are managed?

1. Grasslands as dynamic systems: Grasslands require science-based management to prevent degradation, inappropriate succession, meaning the drift of grassland into woody cover, and the spread of invasive species.
2. Species riding on the same habitat: Rhino habitat also carries swamp deer, wild buffalo, elephants, tigers, grassland birds and several smaller species, so habitat condition decides outcomes well beyond one animal.
3. A national grassland assessment: A five-year project running from 2026 to 2031 on the Comprehensive Assessment of Indian Grasslands will be implemented by the Wildlife Institute of India, the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education and the Forest Survey of India.
4. What it will measure: It will assess grassland extent, ecological condition, biodiversity, degradation, ecosystem services and carbon potential, and will support a National Grassland Atlas, restoration priorities and long-term management guidelines.
5. Flooding as a design condition: Flooding is intrinsic to landscapes such as Kaziranga, and the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme climatic events create new conservation pressures on top of it.
6. What flood management requires: Maintaining access to higher ground, securing ecological connectivity, protecting dispersal routes and managing habitats are the named requirements.

Who actually delivers protection on the ground?

1. What technology adds: Modern surveillance, spatial monitoring, veterinary diagnostics, genetic tools and decision-support systems reinforce traditional fieldcraft.
2. What technology cannot replace: No technology substitutes the forest guards, watchers, mahouts, veterinarians and field officers who patrol these landscapes.
3. Communities around the habitat: The communities living around rhino habitats are equally important to the outcome, since the animals move through land those communities use.
4. Conservation as shared enterprise: The future of the species depends on conservation being treated as a shared enterprise rather than an isolated governmental activity.

How far does cooperation extend beyond national boundaries?

1. The regional forum: The Second Asian Rhino Range States Conservation Meeting was held in New Delhi in 2019.
2. The New Delhi Declaration: India joined Bhutan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Nepal in adopting the Declaration to strengthen conservation cooperation for Asian rhinoceros species.
3. What followed: The Centre and the rhino-bearing states have continued to work within that broader framework, which places a domestic range expansion inside a regional commitment.

Challenges to rhino range expansion

1. Founder population size at a new site: A population begun from a few released animals carries low genetic variation and can fail to establish. Eg. Rhinos moved to Manas National Park under Indian Rhino Vision 2020 were lost to poaching in the years after release, setting that site back.
   The Fix: Fix a minimum release cohort and sex ratio for each new site before a release is authorised, with monitoring obligations running for a set number of years afterwards.
2. Invaded habitat at the release site: Grassland taken over by weedy or woody cover no longer carries the grazing biomass a rhino needs, so a site can be legally protected and biologically unsuitable. Eg. Mikania micrantha has spread through Kaziranga’s grasslands and displaced native forage.
   The Fix: Make invasive removal and a measured forage-biomass threshold conditions of certifying a site as suitable, rather than treating protected status as sufficient.
3. Mortality outside the protected area during floods: Animals leaving a flooded park cross roads and settlements, so deaths occur where the park’s protection does not reach. Eg. Animals crossing from Kaziranga to the Karbi Anglong hills during floods are killed by vehicles on the national highway that separates the two.
   The Fix: Complete elevated animal passages on the highway stretches identified as crossing points and enforce speed restrictions through the flood months.
4. Persistent demand for horn: The horn holds high value in illegal trade, so the cost of protection does not fall as the population grows. Eg. Assam publicly burned a stockpile of over 2,400 rhino horns in 2021 to signal that the horn carries no medicinal value.
   The Fix: Extend stockpile audits and DNA profiling of seized horn to every rhino-bearing state, so a seizure can be traced back to the population it came from.

Conclusion

The rhino’s recovery was achieved inside a small number of well-protected areas, and it is a genuine result. Expansion asks a harder question, whether land outside those areas can be brought to a condition that will hold a founder population and keep it. That makes habitat condition, and not animal numbers, the binding constraint on the next phase. What to watch is whether the programme begins reporting grassland condition alongside population counts, because a range that cannot feed the species is not range.

Grasslands in India

1. Extent and loss: Grassland area has declined by 31 per cent, from 18 million hectares to 12.3 million hectares, and common lands by 19 per cent, from 90.5 million hectares to 73.02 million hectares.
2. Conversion pressure: Humans have converted 70 per cent of the world’s grasslands and 50 per cent of savannahs for agriculture and grazing, compacting soil and accelerating desertification.
3. Species that depend on them: Grassland conversion has contributed to the decline of the Great Indian Bustard and the Lesser Florican.
4. Invasive spread: Prosopis juliflora is spreading across Rajasthan and degrading grassland there.

Government Initiatives for wildlife habitat conservation

1. Project Tiger (1973): Uses core and buffer reserve management to reduce habitat pressure and limit human-tiger interaction in tiger-bearing landscapes.
2. Project Elephant (1992): Protects elephant habitats and corridors, which reduces crop damage and accidental deaths in the districts those corridors run through.
3. National Wildlife Action Plan (2017-31): Sets the national agenda on habitat conservation, protection of endangered species and coexistence strategies.
4. Mission Sahbhagita (2022) and the Save Wetlands Campaign (2023): Mobilised more than 2 million citizens, resulting in the ground-truthing of over 170,000 wetlands and boundary demarcation of nearly 100,000 of them.

Back2Basics: Greater one-horned rhinoceros

1. Conservation status: Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, listed in CITES Appendix I, and placed in Schedule I of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972.
2. The only rhino in India: It is the sole rhino species found in India, also called the Indian rhino, and is Asia’s largest rhino among the five rhino species worldwide.
3. Core protected areas: Pabitora Wildlife Reserve, Rajiv Gandhi Orang National Park, Kaziranga National Park and Manas National Park.
4. Identification: A single black horn and a grey-brown hide with pronounced skin folds, and it is an excellent swimmer.

Matching Previous Year Question

“[2019] Consider the following statements: 1. Asiatic lion is naturally found In India only. 2. Double-humped camel is naturally found in India only. 3. One-horned rhinoceros is naturally found in India only. Which of the statements given above is / are correct? (a) 1 only (b) 2 only (c) 1 and 3 only (d) 1, 2 and 3 (a)”