India’s Eco-Sensitive Zones, meant as protective buffers around national parks, largely exist only on paper.
Notifications were issued under Supreme Court pressure, but crucial Zonal Management Plans were never prepared.
With weak or non-existent committees, no integration into state Master Plans, and no real enforcement, ESZs fail to regulate roads, buildings, quarries and urban growth that steadily erode fragile habitats.
Almost every state forest department in India has the gazette notification of an Eco-Sensitive Zone (ESZ). It is a serious legal instrument: a declaration that the land immediately surrounding a national park or wildlife sanctuary must be managed as a protective buffer against incompatible development. The Supreme Court of India spent years compelling these notifications, state governments published them, and the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change duly recorded them. That is where, for the large majority of the country’s protected areas, the story ends—not in management, not in ecological recovery, but in the archive. The consequences of this burial are not abstract. They are visible in the narrowing margins around urban parks, in the sewage flowing into park water bodies, in the noise saturating the canopy from surrounding highways, and in the stray dogs that have crossed into Harina Vanasthali Wildlife Sanctuary in Hyderabad and killed its deer.
India’s national parks were demarcated on revenue survey maps rather than any ecological logic. The result is that virtually every protected area captures a core habitat while leaving out significant portions of the landscape on which that habitat depends. Elephants in South India range over 300 to 600 square kilometres depending on terrain and season; national parks rarely approach that area. Tigers hold territories that straddle administrative lines. Every park is also embedded in a watershed, and the streams, rivulets, and seasonal flows that sustain its wetlands originate outside its boundaries—in catchment areas the park administration has no authority over. When those areas are paved or drained into open nullahs, the park’s hydrology is degraded without a single tree within the boundary being disturbed.
The ESZ was conceived to address precisely this: not by prohibiting human activity in the surrounding landscape, but by regulating its character, scale, and design so that it remained ecologically compatible with the park’s functioning. A road may be permissible within an ESZ, but only with wildlife crossing structures, drainage provisions, and lighting standards that do not disorient nocturnal fauna. A building may be permitted, but not at urban floor-area ratios and not without setbacks from drainage channels. A quarry may be conditionally allowed, subject to extraction limits, minimum distances from the boundary, and enforceable restoration obligations. None of this emerges from the notification itself. It must be specified in a Zonal Management Plan prepared after notification—and that plan, in almost every ESZ across India, has never been written.
The ESZ is not a no-man’s land. But a managed transition zone without management is simply land that has been labelled and then abandoned to its fate.
The ESZ notification lists activities as permitted, conditionally permitted, or prohibited. It categorises, but specifies no limits on scale or intensity, no design standards, no mitigation requirements, and no mechanism for assessing cumulative impact. The Zonal Management Committee—the body supposed to provide operational oversight—is in most cases either not constituted or constituted in name only, possessing no budget, no secretariat, and no real authority. Forest department officers who nominally chair these committees face a deeper constraint: their legal jurisdiction ends at the park boundary. The ESZ lies in a gap between the Wildlife Protection Act, which applies within the park, and the revenue and urban planning laws that govern the surrounding landscape but make no reference to the ESZ at all. State Master Plans—the instruments determining what can be built where—do not incorporate ESZ overlays, so developers, highway agencies, and municipal authorities make decisions within ESZ areas without any binding ecological check.
No city concentrates the pathologies of urban ESZ governance more visibly than Hyderabad, whose three national parks and wildlife sanctuaries each present a distinct variant of the same structural failure. KBR National Park—approximately 390 hectares of Deccan scrub forest carrying national park status—lost land from within its own boundary for a ring road before its ESZ was contemplated. When the ESZ was drawn, it was calibrated to the geometry of that road rather than to any ecological assessment. The road has since attracted successive rounds of widening, commercial development along its frontage, and traffic intensification, each justified by the permitted status of roads within the zone.
Mrugavani National Park, on the city’s southern edge, was physically divided by the Hyderabad Outer Ring Road and remains mutilated even today. ESZ declaration for Mrugavani has been deferred indefinitely, leaving the surrounding landscape free to develop without constraint.
Harina Vanasthali Wildlife Sanctuary, on the city’s eastern periphery, presents the most layered situation. A large municipal solid waste dump operated for years in Autonagar, immediately adjacent to the park, brought stray dogs. Though no longer active, possibility of residual plastics, and contaminated soil entering the park cannot be ruled out. Residential colonies, and a national highway run along its edge. Land from the park was given to agricultural research institution. Packs of stray dogs have entered the sanctuary and predated on its spotted deer population. A functioning ESZ is yet to be declared, would have to be regulated and remediated.
Urban parks face pressures that cause ecological harm. India’s cities discharge mixed stormwater and sewage into the natural channels that flow into urban parks, carrying nutrient loads that drive eutrophication, pathogens that threaten wildlife health, and persistent toxics that enter the food chain. Simultaneously, chronic noise from surrounding traffic and construction suppresses bird species richness, disrupts predator-prey communication, and alters habitat composition toward noise-tolerant generalists. Water quality monitoring at the drainage entry points of urban protected areas is essentially absent; noise monitoring within ESZs does not exist. These invisible stressors demand an ESZ managed as an active attenuation zone, not merely a line on a land use map.
No ESZ should be notified without a prior ecological baseline covering wildlife movement patterns for large mammals, hydrological mapping of the park’s catchment, and a water quality audit of drainage entering it—with the ESZ boundary drawn in response to what this evidence shows, not to the footprint of the nearest infrastructure project. Every notification must carry a statutory obligation to prepare a Zonal Management Plan within two years, developed through public consultation by a multi-disciplinary team and serving as the operative instrument for all development decisions within the zone. Zonal Management Committees must be constituted with mandatory timelines, given functioning secretariats and budgets, and granted powers to act on applications rather than observe them. State governments must amend their Town and Country Planning Acts to make ESZ restrictions mandatory overlays in Master Plans. For cities with national parks, a cross-departmental authority spanning forest, urban planning, and municipal domains is a practical necessity.
Beyond defending existing parks, India must expand its protected area network. The degraded reserve forests surrounding many parks—grazed, encroached, depleted of canopy—contain significant ecological recovery potential. Forest recovery science, and natural growth in Chernobyl exclusion zone demonstrates that ecological regeneration does not require a functioning forest as its precondition. It requires the reduction of the pressures that prevent one from forming. India’s Eco-Sensitive Zones were designed as the managed outer ring of that protection. Restoring them to that function is a question not of technical capacity but of governance priority—and the parks cannot wait indefinitely for that priority to be established.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth