Eco Watch | Wild water buffaloes: From Kaziranga to Kanha

In late April, four sub-adult Asiatic wild water buffaloes (a male and three females) were loaded into specialised transport vehicles at Kaziranga and driven over 2,000 kilometres to Kanha Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh’s Supkhar forest range in Balaghat district. It is the longest wildlife translocation in Indian history, and the first batch of an eventual 50 animals.

Bubalus arnee is a critically endangered animal, with a global wild population of under 4,000, 99 per cent of them concentrated in Assam. Central India, where these buffaloes once roamed widely, has not seen one since 1979, when Kanha had its last confirmed sighting. Wild buffaloes are ‘grassland engineers’, meaning their grazing maintains the open mosaic that tigers, swamp deer and barasingha depend on. Bringing them back rebuilds a missing ecological function, not just a charismatic species. MP has signalled it will return the favour by sending gharials to Assam, where the endangered crocodilian has all but vanished from the Brahmaputra.

Meanwhile, there is some trepidation over how it all happened so speedily, with the chief ministers of both states getting involved. Translocation is a delicate science. Animals can carry pathogens across landscapes, founder populations can collapse from inbreeding, and politics can potentially override scientific caution. Environmentalists caution against swaps driven by optics rather than ecology.

As of now, the buffaloes have been soft-released into a controlled enclosure at Supkhar. Whether they thrive or not will tell us if India has found a new template for inter-state species swaps that could reshape conservation efforts, or just a faster way to repeat old mistakes.