Rajaji

Rajaji National Park was established in 1983 in the state of Uttarakhand, at the foot of the Himalaya, by merging three earlier sanctuaries: Rajaji, Motichur and Chilla. It protects some 820 km² in the Shivalik hills, the southernmost and youngest range of the Himalayan system, just where the Ganges leaves the mountains and emerges onto the plain at Haridwar. It bears the name of C. Rajagopalachari, the last Governor-General of India.

The landscape combines sal forest, riverine woodland, dry beds of seasonal torrents and grasslands, in a gradient running from 300 to 1,000 metres. It is the north-western limit of the Asian elephant's range: the population of Rajaji and neighbouring Jim Corbett National Park constitutes the species' western extreme in the Himalaya, and maintaining the corridor between the two areas is one of India's conservation priorities.

That corridor is seriously compromised: the motorway, the railway line and the Ganges canal cross the area, and to these are added the urban pressure of Haridwar and Rishikesh and the seasonal passage of the Gujjars, a transhumant pastoral community whose resettlement outside the park has been a long and contentious process. In 2015 Rajaji was declared a tiger reserve, the second in Uttarakhand, and translocations have been carried out since then to reinforce its tiger population, which is much reduced in the western sector of the park.