Kanha National Park is established in -

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, Madhya Pradesh. Kanha lies in the Mandla and Balaghat districts of Madhya Pradesh, on the Maikal range at the eastern end of the Satpuras. Its three legal identities arrived in stages worth memorising as a set: wildlife sanctuary in 1933, national park in 1955, and tiger reserve in 1973–74 as one of the nine reserves with which Project Tiger was launched. The national park covers 940 sq km out of two earlier sanctuaries, Hallon (about 250 sq km) and Banjar (about 300 sq km), created in 1933 and enlarged into the national park on 1 June 1955 — those two figures are the old sanctuary areas, not a partition of the present park, which makes it the largest national park in Madhya Pradesh; as a tiger reserve the notified area is far bigger — 917.43 sq km of core critical tiger habitat plus 1,134.36 sq km of buffer, 2,051.79 sq km in all. The 2022 All India Tiger Estimation counted 105 tigers inside it, and the park drew 213,804 visitors that year. What actually fixes Kanha in memory, though, is not the tiger but the deer. Kanha holds the world's only surviving population of the hard-ground barasingha, Rucervus duvaucelii branderi — a swamp deer that adapted to firm grassland instead of marsh and grazes on nothing but grass — and Kanha was the first Indian tiger reserve to adopt an official mascot, Bhoorsingh the Barasingha, precisely to advertise that recovery. Its sal and bamboo forests and open maidans sit in the Satpura–Maikal belt traditionally associated with Kipling's The Jungle Book, although Kipling set the stories in Seoni and never visited India's central highlands.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Uttarakhand's flagship is Jim Corbett — India's oldest national park, notified in 1936 as Hailey National Park, and like Kanha one of the original nine Project Tiger reserves of 1973–74. A candidate who has filed 'the famous tiger park' under Corbett reaches for Uttarakhand on reflex.  (b) Assam holds Kaziranga, the one-horned rhino stronghold and a World Heritage Site, and Manas, which is both a World Heritage Site and — exactly like Kanha — one of the nine original 1973–74 tiger reserves, with 58 tigers across 2,837.10 sq km in 2022. That shared vintage makes Manas an easy substitution for Kanha.  (d) Maharashtra's entry in the original nine was Melghat (57 tigers, 2,768.52 sq km), and its best-known park today is Tadoba-Andhari. Because Pench straddles the Madhya Pradesh–Maharashtra boundary inside the very same Satpura belt, anyone who places Kanha vaguely 'in central India' can slip one State south-west.

Concept: Kanha is a useful teaching case because it carries all three of India's protected-area labels at once, and they are not synonyms. A wildlife sanctuary is declared by a State government under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, and some private rights and regulated grazing can survive inside it. A national park is the stricter category under section 35 of the same Act: no grazing, and no rights of any person inside except as expressly permitted, with boundaries that cannot be altered except on a resolution of the State Legislature. A tiger reserve is a third and separate thing, created not by the original Act but by the 2006 amendment that placed the National Tiger Conservation Authority on a statutory footing — a State notifies a tiger reserve on the NTCA's recommendation, keeping a core or critical tiger habitat inviolate and managing a buffer zone for human–wildlife coexistence. That is why one forest can be a sanctuary from 1933, a national park from 1955 and a tiger reserve from 1973 with no contradiction at all, and why the figures differ so sharply: Kanha National Park is 940 sq km while Kanha Tiger Reserve is 2,051.79 sq km. Confusing the three is the commonest error in this whole section of the syllabus.

State PCS 2025 Q112 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q112 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer