Kokrajhar: A young Bidinta Basumatary glides through the bumpy ride in this thick forest just like his winged friends or the golden langurs for whom this an old home.
There hidden in the grey brown of a tree trunk, he would spot an unmoving crested serpent eagle or listen to the sound of the greater racket tailed drongo and identify that jungle ventriloquist while the bird would fly over you in seconds later.
Bidinta knocked on the jeep twice and it would stop while you would be looking up at the bird he would point out. How in the world did he spot the pugmarks of a leopard inches away from the safari vehicle’s path, one could wonder. No wonder he is a governor’s awardee for his expertise.
Award winning nature guide Bidinta Basumatary explains a point
at Raimona National Park
Manas and Raimona
But it is also the sheer love for the forest and the place, the Raimona National Park.
Located in Kokrajhar and Gossaigaon and abutting Bhutan the Raimona national park was officially declared on June 9, 2021. It is a haven for the rare golden langur endemic to only Assam and Bhutan.
Raimona has a corridor to the Buxa tiger reserve in neighbouring West Bengal and the Phibsu reserve in Bhutan. With a thrilling ride, one can reach the river at the end where a Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) border outpost stands close to a border pillar on the international Indo-Bhutan border.
Representative Image
Transparent waters of the rive Hel divide the two countries, although not for the herds of elephants and other wildlife for whom borders don’t matter. It is an undivided nearly pristine biodiversity reserve for hundreds of kilometres east to west.
“That’s how there are tigers here and of course, the elusive clouded leopard,” said Bidinta, later showing their camera-trap pictures hung at a colonial-era bungalow.
His Raimona-stickered T-shirt is not the only evidence of his affinity for the Park.
Bidinta’s love for Raimona is admittedly because, he was born in a nearby village, but it is also a kind of attachment for bringing up this newly created national park.
Yet, the skilled nature guide is struggling despite a governor’s award. Besides the fact that entrepreneurial opportunities are hard to come by, perhaps it is also because Raimona as much as Manas and rest of lower Assam is yet to be fully discovered.
At Manas National Park, the Pugmark Resort is just 100 metres from the Park border. In the upmarket section, visitors are actually peeping into the Park from resorts like Musa and Smiling Tusker Elephant camp.
Contrast of East and West
No one can steal the thunder from Kaziranga, the world heritage site near Jorhat where one can simply drive through the highway and see hundreds of deer and rhinos. Tigers and elephants also stray.
The entire circuit of Kaziranga and Majuli is world-renowned, annual footfalls reaching record numbers in 2023-24. More than 3.27 lakh tourists visited the Kaziranga national park in the last fiscal.
Even this year, in the first 15 days of October as many as 13,500 tourists visited the famed grasslands of Assam where the Great Indian one-horned rhinoceros roams free. The revenue was in two weeks was close to Rs30 lakh.
Northwest of Guwahati in the Bodoland area, the Manas national park is also a recognized as a UNESCO world heritage site and is home to the rare hispid hare and pygmy hog, besides rhino, elephant and tiger. The moist deciduous forests also adjoin the forest in Bhutan accessible to tourists from this side.
The log huts of the resorts are unique.
Despite this uniqueness, Manas could attract just 52,394 domestic tourists in 2023-24, according to figures accessed by Business North East (BNE). At the Raimona national park on which the likes of Bidinta hinge their hope for popularity of Bodoland and revenues, the tourist traffic was a dismal 3485 in 2023-24.
The bright side is that the West – foreign tourists – has begun to pay more attention to Manas. Foreign tourist arrival increased from 808 in 2022-23 to 1453 in 2023-24. Even in 2024-25, there have already been 661 foreign arrivals at Manas between April and July 2024.
In fact, foreign tourists contributed to slightly increasing the total tourist traffic in 2023-24 where domestic arrivals fell marginally but foreign arrivals made up for it.
Agency surplus, attention deficit
For the first-time visitor, a lack of guidance on which routes to take at Manas is lacking, only compensated by the thickness of the forest. The forest department is hardly the help that one expects and visitors do expect better orientation and interpretation, a highlight at Kaziranga.
So what’s wrong?
Where there is focused attention, results are forthcoming. Albeit, that focus cannot be from multiple agencies. Here lies the problem for Manas National Park and the other wildlife attractions in Bodoland.
The Bodoland Territorial Council which governs the area is under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution that grants administrative autonomy within a state. Many subjects under the state have already been transferred like the Public Works Department from Dispur to Kokrajhar the seat of power for the BTC.
A golden langur in the Bodoland forests
“But tourism is not completely transferred (from state to BTC),” said a source in BTC. There are several agencies that have control over Manas.
The BTC of course, has come administrative control but so does the Assam forest department, the Project Tiger rules as well as the Assam tourism department.
“As a result, there is multiplicity of agencies that cannot help a coherent administration,” said the official.
Once streamlining of administrative mechanism takes place, Manas promises to compete with even Kaziranga. With Bhutan’s plans to open up neighbouring town Gelephu in a big way, there is already a likelihood of investment spillover into Bodoland.
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