Wild Buffalo Conservation (Ecology)
Wild Buffalo Conservation (Ecology)
Why In News:
Chhattisgarh is planning further translocation and enclosure based conservation breeding to rescue its state animal, the wild buffalo, from extinction, building on earlier translocation exercises that brought animals from Assam's Manas National Park.
Source: The Indian Express, Page 7, 3 August 2026, 'Translocate, keep in enclosures: Chhattisgarh bid to save its wild buffaloes from extinction'
About the Wild Buffalo (Bubalus arnee)
Also called the wild water buffalo, the ancestor of the domestic buffalo.
Listed in Schedule I of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, according it the highest level of legal protection.
Classified as Endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
Declared the state animal of Chhattisgarh in 2001.
Population and Distribution
The global population survives only in a few thousand numbers; Northeast India (the Kaziranga-Manas landscape of Assam) holds close to 92% of the world's wild buffalo population.
In Chhattisgarh, small and fragmented populations survive mainly in the Udanti-Sitanadi Tiger Reserve and Indravati National Park and Tiger Reserve.
Threats to Survival
Habitat loss and fragmentation due to agricultural expansion and mining activity.
Genetic dilution through interbreeding with domestic or feral buffaloes, threatening the purity of the wild gene pool.
Poaching for horns and low natural recruitment caused by a skewed sex ratio.
Conservation Response
Translocation of wild buffaloes from Manas National Park, Assam to Chhattisgarh's Barnawapara Wildlife Sanctuary, under the Central India Wild Buffalo Recovery Project.
The new plan involves enclosure based conservation breeding centres to build a genetically viable, captive assisted population before eventual release into the wild.