Amid the reports of killing of one-horned rhinoceros, Assam’s famous Kaziranga National Park will open up its door for the visitors this season from November 1 this year.
The park closes its door for domestic as well as foreign tourists from May 1 as monsoon approaches the State by then and it remains closed till October 31 every year. The park authorities normally start the annual maintenance works inside the park during this period and then reopen it for tourists in November 1 every year.
“We had started the annual maintenance work of the park and everything will be over by this month. The tourist inflow had been increasing every year and this year too we are also expecting more tourists than last year,” Basu said.
located about 240 kms away from Assam’s main city Guwahati, the park is home to one-horned rhinoceros and it also has the highest rhino density in the world. However, the park which is spread over an area of over 800 square kms also contains significant stock of three other large herbivores - the Asian Elephant, the Asiatic Water Buffalo and the eastern subspecies of the Swamp Deer.
The famed park is also a declared Tiger Reserve and has the highest density of tiger in the world, according to the official statistics.
lakhs of foreign as well as domestic tourists visit the park every year to see mainly the one-horned rhinos. While over one lakh tourists visited the park last year including about 16,000 foreign tourists, about 1.25 lakh tourists had visited the park in 2011 including, close to 7,000 foreign tourists.
However, the park-which is also an UNESCO world heritage site-has been suffering due to the unabated poaching of the rhinos since last year.
While over 40 rhinos have been poached in and around the Kaziranga National Park last year, a total of 23 rhinos have already been poached inside the park since January this year.
Although the State and Central Government had been taking up necessary measures to stop the menace of poaching, yet the poachers strike the park from time-to-time killing the rare species for its horn.
According to the park officials, there are close to 1,200 staff including forest rangers to frontline staffs to guard the park at this moment. The Assam Government had last year created an elite force-Assam Forest Protection Force (AFPF) to protect the wildlife species and armed them with automatic weapons like the AK series rifles. However, the poachers have been successful in giving them a slip and kill the animal for its horn, which has high demand in some South East Asian countries.