The first national parks in India

Declared a national park in 1955 and later a core part of Kanha Tiger Reserve, the forest spans over 2,000 sq km across the Satpura Maikal range. Its terrain moves from low-lying Sal forests and bamboo thickets to drier plateaus with mixed deciduous trees like Haldu, Tendu, and Indian ghost tree. Abandoned villages have turned into open meadows where herbivores gather—chital, gaur, wild boar, and the hard ground barasingha’s distinctive antlered silhouette. In fact, Kanha was once the only place on Earth where you could find this swamp deer that nearly vanished in the 1960s. At one point, only a few dozen survived, mostly confined to a single meadow but forest staff worked towards protecting the species, building protective enclosures, regulating grass height, and even relocating villages to keep cattle out. Slowly, the population began to recover and today, over 800 barasingha roam the park’s grasslands, and some have even been reintroduced to other reserves. Beyond barasingha, the park supports healthy populations of tiger (at 105), leopard, dhole, and sloth bear, along with over 300 bird species. It was one of the first nine reserves chosen for Project Tiger in 1973. Since then, human settlements in the core have been fully relocated, and forest corridors in the buffer zone are managed to reduce conflict and expand animal movement.

Tadoba National Park (1955), Maharashtra

Tiger in Tadoba-Andhari Tiger ReserveAnand Atre/Getty Images

Tadoba National Park, established in 1955, forms the heart of the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve, a protected forest in Maharashtra’s Chandrapur district. The reserve also includes the Andhari Wildlife Sanctuary, designated in 1986. Together, the park and sanctuary were unified under Project Tiger in 1993 to form the present-day reserve, which now spans 622.87 sq km of dry deciduous forest, bamboo thickets, and perennial lakes. The forest was originally designated as a Reserved Forest in 1879 by the British, primarily for timber extraction. In 1935, a small sanctuary was created to protect some of its wildlife, but hunting remained legal for several decades in surrounding zones. It wasn’t until the 1970s that formal hunting blocks were shut and stricter conservation measures introduced, and Tadoba has since become one of Maharashtra’s best-preserved forest ecosystems. Its teak-heavy canopy is punctuated by flame of the forest, tendu, crocodile bark, and bamboo. Lakes like Tadoba and Kolsa, along with the Andhari River, run through the reserve and attract both prey and predators. Tadoba now supports a stable population of around 97 Bengal tigers, as well as leopards, sloth bears, wild dogs, and striped hyenas. Large herbivores like sambar, chital, nilgai, and the four-horned antelope are common. Birdlife is rich, with nearly 200 species, including raptors like the crested serpent eagle and grey-headed fish eagle. During the monsoon, butterflies, including pansies, swordtails, mormons, arrive in striking variety, and insect life surges across the forest floor.

Madhav National Park (1958), Madhya Pradesh

Set in the northern reaches of Madhya Pradesh, just outside Shivpuri town, Madhav National Park is a mix of dry deciduous forest, twin lakes, and Raj-era hunting architecture. Once the private shooting reserve of the Scindias and, earlier, Mughal emperors, it was one of the first parks to be brought under protection after independence, in part because its former use as a royal hunting ground had spared it from large-scale development. Spread over 355 sq km in the upper Vindhya hills, the terrain rolls gently through Kardhai-Salai forests, with patches of Khair and Dhaora on the drier slopes. Grasslands are patchy, often forming around Sakhya Sagar and Madhav Sagar lakes, two artificial reservoirs teeming with aquatic life and ringed by migratory birds and marsh crocodiles, basking openly on the lakebanks. On the shore of Sakhya Sagar, the 1919 Boat Club constructed by the Maharaja of Gwalior, served royal guests and later tourists as a vantage point for birdwatching waterfowls, bar-headed geese, and demoiselle cranes in the wintertime. Pockets of infrastructure in the park like this remain as historical records of India’s shifting relationship with wildlife. The abandoned Shooting Box, a lakeside hide once used to observe (and hunt) tigers, still overlooks Sakhya Sagar and deep inside the Madhav Tiger Reserve at the park’s highest point stands George Castle, built in 1911 for a tiger shoot planned for King George V. Today, though leopards are the dominant predator at Madhav, tigers, once locally extinct for decades, have made a cautious return since 2007. Other wildlife in the park includes common ungulates like chital, nilgai, chinkara, and sambar, with occasional sightings of the rare four-horned antelope.

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