An Assam resident has petitioned the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), requesting it to immediately dispatch a fact-finding team to assess the ecological impact of a proposed 34.45-km elevated corridor along the southern boundary of Kaziranga National Park and Tiger Reserve.
Prasanta Kumar Saikia, a resident of Gomothagaon village in Nagaon district, has requested that the Government of India and the Assam government suspend the project until a comprehensive evaluation is completed.
In his letter dated November 19, Saikia urged UNESCO Director-General Khaled El-Enany to enforce strict compliance with World Heritage Site conservation guidelines, particularly those that protect wildlife corridors and prevent habitat fragmentation.
Project background
In October, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma announced that the foundation stone for the elevated corridor along the national highway would be laid by the end of the year. The project is intended to ease traffic congestion and reduce animal road kills, especially during monsoon floods.
Saikia warned that the prolonged construction process itself would cause severe disturbance to the park’s endangered wildlife. He argued:
“It is foreseeable that the prolonged earsplitting noise, vibrations, heavy machinery movement, and human activity involved in the elevated corridor construction are likely to immeasurably disrupt the free mobility along the animal corridors and ruthlessly disturb the breeding patterns of several endangered species in the wild habitat.”
He added that such massive infrastructure would adversely affect the fragile ecological balance and defeat decades of conservation efforts, irreversibly damaging the integrity and outstanding universal value of Kaziranga.
Kaziranga’s global significance
Saikia highlighted the park’s extraordinary biodiversity in his letter:
“Kaziranga is one of the finest and the most picturesque wildlife refuges in South Asia, with a wide diversity of species and the largest undisturbed floodplain on the Brahmaputra. The site lies within a Conservation International-designated Conservation Hotspot, a WWF Global 200 Eco-region, and is one of the world’s Endemic Bird Areas.”
The park hosts around 35 major mammal species, including 15 threatened Schedule I species, the world’s largest population of Indian one-horned rhinoceros, and over 300 bird species.
Direct appeal to UNESCO
“As a nature-loving resident of India, I strongly oppose the proposed project, especially because the construction…along the southern periphery of the Kaziranga National Park is in total violations of the World Heritage Convention,” Saikia wrote.
He concluded by saying, “In view of Kaziranga’s global ecological importance and its recognition as a World Heritage Site, I earnestly request the UNESCO to kindly look into this matter, engage with the authorities, all the stakeholders, and try to find out immediate ways to avoid disturbing the endangered wildlife species.”