With French and Indian technical and monetary assist, the Indo-Pacific Parks Partnership will facilitate partnership actions for pure parks of the Indo-Pacific area. These actions embrace biodiversity conservation, wildlife administration and engagement with native communities.

The Kaziranga mission is part of a bigger Assam Project on Forest and Biodiversity Conservation (APFBC) for which the Agence Française de Développement (AFD) has dedicated funding of €80.2 million for a 10-year interval, between 2014-2024. The mission conceptualised the reforestation of 33,500 hectares of land and the coaching of 10,000 neighborhood members in alternate livelihoods by 2024.

But it’s the 457 sq km Kaziranga National Park that continues to be the center of the programme.

Chief Conservator of Forests and Kaziranga National Park and Tiger Reserve Director Jatindra Sarma says that the inhabitants of animals within the park is the healthiest it has ever been. With assistance from AFD funding, conservation has been ramped up with few poaching instances recorded previously 5 years.

“There was just one case of poaching this year, one in 2021 and two cases the year before that. We have successfully stopped poaching in the area,” says Sarma.

Sarma provides that what the AFD programme has been best in is the skilling of communities within the space, notably forest-dwelling communities.

Assam officers say that lots of the neighborhood members would generally be engaged in unlawful tree felling by middlemen for unlawful timber commerce, and would additionally give shelter to poachers, which now not occurs.

The unlawful timber commerce is likely one of the principal causes for the degradation of forests across the reserve. The Assam authorities has now begun a large reforestation drive with the assistance of the AFD.

Divisional Forest Officer, Kaziranga Park, Ramesh Gogoi says that the “protection strategy” adopted by Kaziranga includes organising 223 anti-poaching camps throughout the park.

“We ensured that the focus of camps is greater in areas the place there has historically been a poaching stress. The AFD funding has helped us equip the camps in addition to construct the requisite infrastructure,’’says Gogoi.

There are 35 six-seven foot tall embankments or highlands which were constructed in numerous areas across the park, that animals can climb on to and search refuge in the course of the annual flooding. The mission has additionally developed infrared-based early warning methods, triggered by elephant footfall, to both scare off herds from human habitat or to warn villagers.