World Rhino Day highlights need for India-Bhutan joint conservation

…Day on Tuesday (September 22, 2026) by celebrating the herbivore’s “comeback” and three successive years of zero poaching. Rhino specialists, however, called for a policy shift by making Bhutan a conservation partner. “ According to the 2022 census, Manas has an estimated 48 rhinos, although some died and a few were born during these four years. We have a much better environment today because the local stakeholders want more rhinos, which they say draw more tourists than other animals, including the tiger ,” Deba Kumar Dutta, a frontline conservation scientist associated with the rhino translocation programme, said. “Manas National Park has the capacity to carry more rhinos, but some of the ones thriving today are…

…approach. Additional Chief Conservator of Forests and the BTC’s Council Head of the (Forest) Department, Sonali Ghosh, credited Manas’s “rhino comeback story” to the people living on the fringes of the tiger reserve. “ A breeding, self-sustaining population of rhinos in Manas is proof that community-led conservation works ,” she said after the World Rhino Day celebration in the national park’s Bhuyanpara Range. Extremism-driven civil unrest and poaching, primarily to trade horns for arms, wiped out Manas’s historic population of about…