Ganga with her newly born calf

Manas, June 19, 2015: IFAW-WTI’s effort to repopulate Manas National Park in Assam with rhinos is paying rich dividends with one of the hand reared rhinos, Ganga, giving birth to a healthy calf. Since being released back into the wild in 2010, this is Ganga’s second calf in four years. What has had the conservationists cheering is how Ganga defied the laws of nature and gave birth in a span of 26 months, as compared to four or five years for wild rhinos.

“Twenty six months of inter-calving is very unusual, but we are happy that our efforts to Bring Back Manas are slowly turning into a great conservation story of the 21st century,” said Bhaskar Choudhury, Head Veterinarian, IFAW-WTI. The new born calf was sighted by the IFAW-WTI team on June 19 which was later confirmed by Forest Department.

Ganga with her newly born calf

Only four-month-old, Ganga was rescued in July 2004 by the Assam Forest Department after she was swept away during the annual floods in Kaziranga National Park. Thereafter, she was admitted to IFAW-WTI run CWRC by the Forest Department. After being hand-reared for almost three years, she along with two other female rhinos, Mainao and Jamuna, was released in a boma in Manas in 2007 to repopulate the region with wild rhino population that had locally gone extinct. In 2010, she was finally let out of the boma to live in the wild.

After a wait of three years, conservationists were thrilled when she gave birth to a female calf in 2013 bringing success to the rehabilitation programme. That year saw the two other released rhinos Jamuna and Mainao also give birth to young ones.

Manas National Park had all the epithets that a protected area can dream of. It was a National Park, a tiger reserve and a World Heritage Site as declared by UNESCO until it was almost completely stripped of its faunal and floral heritage during a period of civil unrest in the region in the late 80s and early 90s. Since then, IFAW- WTI with the Assam Forest Department have put eight rhinos back to the wild and these rhinos have already started contributing to the pride of Manas as a revived UNESCO World Heritage site.