Shrinking buffers: ESZ cuts in the Kaziranga National Park and Mahananda Wildlife Sanctuary

In the age of the anthropocene where human activity has become the primary driver of irreversible environmental change, nation-states face a persistent development quandary. While there’s urgency to keep pace with technological, infrastructural and market-led changes in an increasingly interdependent world, this same interdependence is undermined by human-centric development and resource-management plans that treat ecology as an afterthought. The quandary is further entrenched by a myopic vision of development, one that reads luxury resorts in the wilderness, techno raves in remote valleys, high-rises, malls and transnational companies in ‘untouched’ lands as markers of material progress. Perhaps it is our hubris as a species or the inherited neoliberal models of development which leads us to normalise the violent plundering of our forests, the relentless rupturing of our mountains, and the ritual defiling of our rivers. States, too, often fail communities whose livelihoods are tied to the environment, leaving them no viable option but to accept trade-offs that threaten species, habitats and biodiversity.

Over the past two months, the bucolic Kaziranga National Park and Tiger Reserve has become the site of a political row pitting economic development against environmental conservation. On 8th August 2026, the Assam government announced plans to propose reducing the Eco-Sentive Zone (ESZ) surrounding the Park from 10 kilometres to 1. This move is expected to ease restrictions on development around Bokakhat, where a stalled sports stadium project awaits clearance. Since Kaziranga does not yet have a final ESZ notification, the 10km limit currently applies by default; the state argues the change would replace this with a scientifically defined 1km zone, offering local communities greater regulatory clarity and increased livelihood opportunities. The Indian National Congress, the Communist Party of India, the Assam Environmental NGO Forum and conservationists nationwide have opposed the decision, citing threats to wildlife movement in the buffer zone during monsoon floods. Yet several local residents and groups such as the Karbi Students’ Association and the Takam Mising Porin Kebang have welcomed it, calling the reduction a long-standing demand of communities residing in Bokakhat, Kaziranga and Kaliabor. Furthermore, the groups argued that relaxing the radius rule does not necessarily imply that previous judicial prohibitions on mining and land conversion shall become defunct, although illegal mining remains a continual contention in the region.

This announcement follows the detention of land rights activist Pranab Doley on 12th July 2026 who had been leading protests against a proposed luxury hotel project in Inglay Pathar adjoining the Park over its potentially detrimental ecological impacts and the displacement of indigenous inhabitants. Granting Doley bail on 29th July, the Golagahat sessions court found a lack of evidence for the state’s allegations and noted that “In matters where ecological preservation intersects with indigenous survival, the standard apparatus of criminal law cannot be used to suppress local anxieties. True public order is achieved not by silencing the affected, but by listening to them.” Judge NM Abdullah Ahmed further added that treating activists or community leaders as ‘external disruptive elements’ will not yield any fruitful results, and that including them in dialogue would balance the uneven power dynamics in favour of the communities who fail to negotiate with corporates or state entities on equal terms due to structural inequalities. Yet the Assam government invoked the National Security Act (NSA) against Doley, who has remained in preventive detention ever since. The action raises questions about its legality and compels one to ponder why a government that touts the agenda of Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas (Together with All, Development for All) is so wary of dissent, preferring to speed past negotiations and reward only sycophantic agreement.

674 kilometres away, the newly minted West Bengal government notified a similar move in July 2026, reducing the ESZ around the Mahananda Wildlife Sanctuary from 5 kilometres to 1. The move aims to boost state revenue and generate employment by removing legal hurdles for hospitality and housing projects in Siliguri, Dabgram, Salugara, Sukna and adjoining areas. Though the state government has affirmed that wildlife protection and environmental conservation will not be compromised, it remains unclear whether the 1km buffer zone shall be uniformly demarcated. Since 2016, Siliguri has lost much of its forest cover due to the Asian Highway project. Large swathes of tea gardens and canopies of old hardwood trees have been cleared in the past decade for the construction of public and private infrastructure and widening of the Siliguri Corridor, even as the city’s once-temperate climate grows increasingly erratic and its streets are choked by traffic, waterlogging, and waste. Forest personnel are routinely summoned to intercept elephants or leopards that stray from depleted forests into the heart of human settlements in search of food and shelter because development activities in the North Bengal region seem to be catching up with its non-human residents as well. Yet the ESZ reduction here has received relatively scant media attention and here too, the decision has been supported by several local residents.

Together, these instances reveal that conservation itself is understood in exclusionary terms—humans and non-humans kept apart for mutual benefit—and herein lies the root of the development quandary. A radical reimagination of conservation, such as what Bajpai and Kothari (2026) call ‘earthy governance,’ requires acknowledging that the world we inhabit is not ours alone and that power is embedded not only within social networks but in non-human networks of interaction as well. Moreover, Kaziranga and Mahananda reveal a larger pattern of development governance, the precedent for which has been set gradually through the Great Nicobar Island Development Project, the denotification pressures on Jim Corbett and Bannerghatta National Parks, shrinking the ESZ around Gir, and the contested Western Ghats Ecologically Sensitive Area notifications. Each time, buffers have been treated as administrative bottlenecks, locals have rejoiced in anticipation of opportunities, and the cacophony of conservationists have been cast into oblivion. Development, therefore, might leave behind only ecological obituaries for our future generations unless conservation is foregrounded in co-existence and policymaking looks beyond the management of inconvenience.