Kaziranga National Park

Mary Curzon, wife of the Viceroy, is credited with prompting protection after visiting in 1904 and failing to see a single rhino. A reserved forest was declared in 1905, the area became a game sanctuary and then a national park in 1974. Rhino numbers have recovered from a few dozen to over two thousand, though poaching remains a continuing pressure.

The park is defined by the annual flood: the Brahmaputra inundates much of it each monsoon, renewing the grassland and forcing animals onto higher ground and across the highway to the Karbi Anglong hills. Besides rhino it holds significant populations of wild water buffalo, eastern swamp deer and Asian elephant, and one of the highest densities of tiger of any protected area. Birdlife is exceptional, and the park is an Important Bird Area.

Kaziranga is one of conservation's clearest recoveries, and the flood-driven grassland it protects is a habitat that has almost entirely disappeared elsewhere in the region. The annual inundation is not a threat to be engineered away but the process that sustains the system.

Inscribed in 1985 under criteria (ix) and (x) for its ecological processes and the significance of its habitat for in-situ conservation of biodiversity.