In August 2026, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma announced that the state government would approach the Centre within two months with a proposal to shrink the Eco-Sensitive Zone (ESZ) around Kaziranga National Park and Tiger Reserve from the existing default of 10 kilometres to a “scientifically defined” 1 kilometre.

The trigger for this move is a legal technicality. Kaziranga has not yet received a final ESZ notification, which means the Supreme Court’s default 10-km limit continues to apply, a position the Gauhati High Court reaffirmed as recently as March 2026. Sarma has argued that once the park is finally notified, the state will push for a 1-km buffer instead, framing this as compliance with a 2022 Supreme Court direction that national parks and wildlife sanctuaries should have an ESZ of at least 1 kilometre from their demarcated boundaries, while acknowledging that where an existing or proposed ESZ extends beyond 1 km, the larger limit is meant to prevail.

The stated motivation is economic and civic, not ecological. The government says the 10-km restriction has held back infrastructure and urban development around Bokakhat, including plans for a stadium and other civic works. Sarma has since sought to reassure critics that the park’s own boundary remains untouched — only the buffer zone outside it is being rationalised, in response to demands from local communities to protect their livelihoods. He has also clarified that the existing 10-km provision will legally continue until the state formally notifies a new ESZ, meaning nothing has changed on the ground yet — but the direction of travel is clear.

Why the Buffer Exists in the First Place

An Eco-Sensitive Zone is not an extension of the park itself. It is a regulatory cushion — a “shock absorber” — around a protected area, meant to ease the transition from a zone of strict protection to one of normal human activity, while restricting the most damaging activities (mining, large polluting industry, unregulated construction) close to the park boundary.

For Kaziranga specifically, the case for a wide buffer is unusually strong, for reasons tied directly to its geography:

• Flood ecology. Kaziranga is a floodplain park — more than 70% of its terrain is flood-prone, and the surrounding buffer has historically allowed animals to move safely to higher ground during the annual monsoon floods.
• Wildlife corridors. Assam has officially identified nine wildlife corridors linking the Karbi Anglong Hills to Kaziranga, and these corridors extend well beyond a single kilometre. A 1-km ESZ would leave most of this corridor network outside any regulatory protection.
• Shrinking habitat, already. A 2020 WWF-India-led landscape study found forest cover in the corridor complexes around the park fell from 1,176.69 sq km in 2002 to 748.28 sq km in 2013, squeezing animals into increasingly fragmented patches of secure ground even before any formal reduction in the ESZ.

The Environmental Implications

1. Loss of flood refuge for wildlife. Kaziranga’s rhinos, elephants, deer and other megafauna routinely leave the park during floods to reach higher ground outside its boundary. Wildlife expert Jadav Payeng has warned that a narrower buffer could have a “drastic effect” on this movement — if development fragments these escape routes, animals could be trapped inside the flooded park or pushed into closer contact with people. This is one of the more serious near-term risks, since it links directly to animal mortality during monsoon season, an annual event rather than a hypothetical one.

2. Fragmentation of corridors and rising human-animal conflict. Ecologists stress that Kaziranga cannot be understood only within its official boundary. Catchments, grasslands and smaller habitats outside the park can be just as important to the wider ecosystem, particularly where they support animal movement or connect fragmented habitats, and a smaller ESZ could bring development closer to the wildlife corridors and habitats surrounding the park. Fragmented corridors typically translate into more frequent crop raiding, property damage, and dangerous encounters between people and rhinos, elephants or tigers moving between habitat patches.

3. Unregulated construction, mining and pollution near the park. A reduced ESZ removes the regulatory check on environmentally damaging activity close to the park, opening the door to encroachment, illegal mining and unmitigated infrastructure development in an area that currently acts as a buffer against exactly these pressures.

4. Risk to Kaziranga’s UNESCO World Heritage status. Kaziranga is a UNESCO World Heritage Site precisely because of the integrity of its wider landscape, not just the park’s legal boundary. Conservation groups argue the reduction could threaten that status if the buffer that supports the park’s ecological functioning is dismantled.

5. Undermining conservation gains already under pressure. This is not the first sign of retreat on protections in the Kaziranga landscape. In June 2025, Assam withdrew a preliminary notification for a proposed ninth addition to the park, covering 2,570 hectares in Sonitpur district — a decision that already drew criticism from conservationists concerned about ecological connectivity.

The Counter-Argument

It would be one-sided to present this purely as reckless deregulation. The state government’s position has some real grounding:

• The 10-km figure is, legally, only a default that applies in the absence of a site-specific notification — it was never meant to be permanent or uniform. This default applies anywhere in the country until a state completes the process of securing its own smaller, site-specific zone, and Assam has simply not completed that process for Kaziranga.
• A blanket 10-km radius around a park like Kaziranga inevitably swallows up existing towns, roads and settlements (Bokakhat among them), freezing ordinary civic development — schools, hospitals, water and sewage infrastructure — for the people who already live there. Sarma’s argument is that a “scientifically defined” zone, drawn around actual ecological features rather than a uniform circle, could serve both conservation and local livelihoods better than a blunt 10-km ring.
• As former Indian Forest Service officer B.K. Singh has pointed out, Assam is not doing anything unprecedented — other states have already brought their ESZs down to one to three km, and in some patches to zero, citing Bannerghatta and Dandeli Sanctuaries in Karnataka as examples. That does not resolve the ecological risk, but it does put the proposal in the context of a wider, pre-existing national pattern rather than a uniquely aggressive move by Assam.

The core dispute, then, is less about whether a default 10-km ring makes sense everywhere, and more about whether 1 km is the right number for a floodplain park with active, well-documented wildlife corridors extending well beyond that distance — and whether “scientifically defined” will, in practice, mean drawn around real ecological data or drawn to accommodate specific development projects like the Bokakhat stadium.

Similar Attempts Across India

Kaziranga is far from an isolated case. The tension between ESZ buffers and local development pressure has played out — sometimes quietly, sometimes in open legal battles — around protected areas across the country for over a decade.

Protected Area	State	What Happened
Bannerghatta National Park	Karnataka	The Centre accepted the state’s recommendation to shrink the ESZ from 268.9 sq km (2016) to 168.84 sq km (2018), despite strong opposition from citizens’ groups under the “SaveBannerghatta” campaign, and even after the Centre’s own expert committee had suggested extending the zone toward Bengaluru instead.
Dandeli Wildlife Sanctuary	Karnataka	Cited alongside Bannerghatta as an example of an ESZ brought down sharply — in some patches effectively to zero — under pressure from surrounding human habitation.
Mukundra Hills Tiger Reserve	Rajasthan	A proposal put the ESZ at just 0–1 km, prompting the environment ministry’s own expert committee to note that the zone was already “bare minimum” with no scope for further reduction, and that at one point it came within just 300 metres of the core area.
Chaparala Wildlife Sanctuary	Maharashtra	A 0–5 km ESZ was proposed, with the zone reduced to zero at two locations on the north-western side where agricultural land exists.
Dadra and Nagar Haveli Wildlife Sanctuary	Union Territory	The Supreme Court expressed open alarm after the Ministry of Environment and Forest reduced the ESZ from 10 km to just 100 metres, calling it a “complete arbitrary exercise of powers” capable of destroying national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, in a case tied to an environmental clearance for an industrial unit inside the zone.
Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary	Kerala	A draft notification proposed an ESZ of 118.59 sq km, which became the subject of significant local controversy, reflecting the broader friction between conservation buffers and communities living inside them.
21 national parks/sanctuaries across 9 states	West Bengal, Assam, Karnataka, Maharashtra, J&K, Manipur, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Uttar Pradesh	The Supreme Court noted in December 2018 that these nine states had not moved to notify ESZs at all, 12 years after being directed to do so, and ordered a 10-km buffer around 21 parks and sanctuaries in the interim — including, notably, Assam’s own Pobitora Sanctuary.
50 tiger reserves and national parks nationwide	Multiple, including Uttarakhand’s Corbett and Rajaji reserves and Assam’s Kaziranga	As of recent reporting, roughly 50 tiger reserves and parks are still awaiting final ESZ notification, with the environment ministry citing discrepancies in states’ proposals — including at least one instance where a Himachal Pradesh sanctuary’s proposed ESZ was flagged for being effectively zero kilometres.

The Bigger Pattern

Read together, these cases point to a consistent playbook: a protected area is assigned a wide default buffer (usually 10 km) in the absence of a final, site-specific notification; local political and commercial pressure builds around towns and infrastructure projects sitting inside that buffer; the state then proposes a sharply reduced, “scientifically” or “site-specifically” defined zone — often 0 to 3 km, sometimes effectively zero at points — that the Centre’s own expert committees frequently flag as inadequate but which, as Bannerghatta shows, still often gets approved.

Kaziranga’s case adds a distinctive layer of urgency because of its flood ecology — the buffer there is not just a corridor for occasional wildlife movement but an annual, life-or-death escape route for the park’s signature species, including the one-horned rhinoceros. Whether the state’s “scientifically defined 1 km” turns out to mean a genuine ecological assessment of corridors and flood-refuge areas, or a boundary drawn to fit a stadium and civic works, will likely determine whether this becomes another Bannerghatta — or an exception to the pattern.