Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi admits that the situation is serious but blames the Centre
When a group of forest guards at Assam's Kaziranga National Park - a UNESCO heritage site - spotted the carcass of a female one-horned rhino last Monday, it sent the alarm bells ringing.
Since the year began, four rhinos have been killed - that's one rhino killed every 11 days so far. The BJP that had made rhino-poaching an emotive campaign during the 2014 Lok Sabha polls accused the Gogoi government of being a mute spectator. "The state government has more or less remained a mute and silent spectator for rampant killings," Siddharth Bhattacharjya, a former BJP chief in Assam, told NDTV.
The BJP alleges that the Gogoi government has been soft on encroachers who have settled in the periphery of the Kaziranga National Park that is spread in an area of 430 square kilometers.
And in the past one decade, the party claims, there seems to be a direct link between these encroachments and rhino killings. For example, in 2005 when the encroachments were not so widespread, the national park lost seven rhinos to poachers. But in 2014, this figure increased almost four times as 27 rhinos were killed.
Last year, even after a sustained anti-poaching campaign, Kaziranga saw 17 rhinos being killed. Rhinos are killed mainly for their horn that are said to have medicinal properties. A horn weighing one kilogram can fetch up to Rs 60 lakhs in the international grey market.
Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi admits that the situation is serious but blames the Centre.
He says the Centre had assured help to modernise the state's forest guard with latest equipment and weapons but not much has come out of these promises. "Even today I asked how to protect Rhinos with latest technology but we need the Central Government help to buy the equipment. We hope the Centre implements what they promise," the Chief Minister told NDTV.
As the Congress and the BJP engage in a usual bitter war of words, Assam's famed one-horned rhinos - an endangered animal - keeps falling prey to the greed of poachers.