Sundarbans National Park

Sundarbans National Park occupies the southern fringe of the Ganga–Brahmaputra–Meghna delta in the South 24 Parganas district of West Bengal, forming the Indian core of a mangrove ecosystem shared with Bangladesh. The Indian Sundarbans were first notified as a forest division in the colonial period, but the modern conservation architecture dates to 1973, when the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve was constituted under Project Tiger. The core area of that reserve was declared Sundarbans National Park on 4 May 1984 under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972. UNESCO inscribed the park as a World Heritage Site in 1987 under natural criteria, recognising its outstanding biodiversity and ongoing ecological and biological processes. The wider region was designated the Sundarban Biosphere Reserve in 1989 under the Man and the Biosphere Programme, and a 4,260-square-kilometre tract was recognised as a Ramsar site (Wetland of International Importance) on 30 January 2019, making it India's largest protected wetland.

The park's legal protection rests on the layered framework of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, which prohibits hunting, grazing, and resource extraction within national park boundaries. Project Tiger oversight is exercised through the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), constituted under the 2006 amendment to the Act, which approves the reserve's tiger conservation plan and sanctions central funding. The tiger reserve is structured in the standard core-buffer pattern: the national park constitutes the inviolate core, surrounded by buffer zones where regulated activity is permitted. The Sajnekhali Wildlife Sanctuary, notified in 1976, abuts the park and functions as a key buffer and the headquarters of reserve administration. Management plans address tide-driven habitat dynamics, anti-poaching patrols by boat, and human–wildlife conflict mitigation along the inhabited forest edge.

The reserve's distinctive feature is that it is a tidal halophytic mangrove forest dissected by an intricate network of rivers, creeks, and estuaries subject to twice-daily tidal inundation. The dominant tree, the sundari (Heritiera fomes), gives the region its name, alongside genera such as Avicennia, Rhizophora, and Bruguiera that produce aerial pneumatophores for respiration in waterlogged saline soil. The park is the principal stronghold of the Royal Bengal tiger population that has adapted to swimming between islands and is uniquely associated with attacks on humans. Other notable fauna include the estuarine crocodile, Gangetic and Irrawaddy dolphins, the water monitor lizard, the olive ridley turtle, and the endangered northern river terrapin. The region is also critical habitat for fishing cats and a vast assemblage of avifauna.

Contemporary administration runs through the West Bengal Forest Department's Sundarban Tiger Reserve directorate, headquartered at Sajnekhali, with the field director reporting to the state Principal Chief Conservator of Forests and to the NTCA in New Delhi. The most recent all-India tiger estimation cycles, coordinated by the Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, and released through the NTCA, have placed the Sundarbans tiger population in the broad range of the low-to-mid hundreds, with the 2018 and 2022 assessments confirming a stable-to-rising trend. The transboundary dimension is managed in part through a 2011 Memorandum of Understanding between India and Bangladesh on the conservation of the Sundarban, given that the Bangladeshi portion holds its own World Heritage inscription dating to 1997.

Sundarbans National Park must be distinguished from the several overlapping designations attached to the same landscape. The national park is a single, strictly protected category under the Wildlife (Protection) Act; the tiger reserve is a larger administrative-funding unit under Project Tiger that contains the park as its core; the biosphere reserve is a UNESCO MAB designation emphasising zoned coexistence of conservation and human livelihoods; and the Ramsar site is a wetland-treaty listing focused on hydrological and waterbird values. These are not synonyms, and a precise answer in examination or policy work names the specific instrument. The park is also distinct from a wildlife sanctuary, which permits a wider range of regulated human activity than a national park does.

The Sundarbans face acute and contested pressures. Sea-level rise and saltwater intrusion linked to climate change threaten both mangrove regeneration and the freshwater balance, while cyclones of increasing intensity—Aila in 2009, Bulbul in 2019, Amphan in 2020, and Yaas in 2021—have repeatedly devastated forest and embankments. Reduced freshwater flow attributed to upstream barrages, illegal fishing, honey collection mortality from tiger attacks, and proposed coal-fired power projects near the Bangladeshi boundary have all generated controversy. Erosion has already submerged islands such as Lohachara, displacing inhabitants and feeding debate over climate refugees within India.

For the working practitioner, Sundarbans National Park is a recurring reference point across environmental governance, disaster management, and India–Bangladesh diplomacy. UPSC General Studies Paper III draws on it to test the overlapping protected-area categories, mangrove ecology as a natural coastal buffer, and climate vulnerability of deltaic populations. Desk officers and researchers cite the reserve as a case study in transboundary conservation, in the application of the Coastal Regulation Zone framework, and in the tension between strict preservation and the livelihoods of a forest-dependent human population numbering in the millions across the broader delta.