Kanha's Hard-Ground Barasingha Rose From 66 Animals in 1970 to About 1,100 Under Madhya Pradesh Forest Department Care, and a Second Herd Started in Satpura in 2015 Reached 172 by 2023

The hard-ground barasingha, a deer of central India’s dry grasslands, numbered 66 in Kanha in 1970 according to the reserve’s own records, and Kanha was then the only place the subspecies survived. In January 2026 the Madhya Pradesh Forest Department reported around 1,100 there. Since 2015 its staff have also moved deer to Satpura Tiger Reserve, where a 2026 study counted 172 animals in 2023, up from the 98 that were brought in.

The recovery is the work of Kanha’s forest staff, among them H. S. Panwar, the Divisional Forest Officer at Kanha in the early 1970s, and of Indian scientists. Neha Awasthi and Shravana Goswami of the Wildlife Institute of India wrote the Satpura study with Krishnamoorthy Lakshmanan and Sumit Saha of the Madhya Pradesh Forest Department. This article sets out the counts, who published each one, and where they disagree.

Hard hooves and twelve tines

The barasingha, also called swamp deer, takes its Hindi name from its many-tined antlers, which Down To Earth counts as twelve tines. Three subspecies live in the Indian subcontinent. Satpura Tiger Reserve’s website says the northern one lives mainly in Dudhwa National Park in Uttar Pradesh, another is found in Kaziranga in Assam, and the central Indian subspecies, Rucervus duvaucelii branderi, was endemic to Kanha.

A species profile by Q. Qureshi, V. B. Sawarkar, A. R. Rahmani and P. K. Mathur of the Wildlife Institute of India explains the name “hard-ground”. The northern deer have splayed hooves for swampy ground, while the central deer have close-knit, hard hooves adapted to firm ground.

Kanha lies in the Maikal range of the Satpura hills, across Mandla and Balaghat districts. The National Tiger Conservation Authority lists it as declared in 1973 to 1974, with 917.43 sq km of core and 1,134.36 sq km of buffer, 2,051.79 sq km in all. It is one of the nine tiger reserves in Madhya Pradesh.

From 3,023 to 66

Claude Martin studied the Kanha herd from April 1971 to April 1973, with Madhya Pradesh Forest Department staff helping in the field, and published the results in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society in 1977. He gives a Forest Department census of 3,023 animals in 1938 for the area of the present park, 551 in 1953 and 66 in 1970.

George Schaller, whose 1967 book The Deer and the Tiger covered Kanha, counted 82 in 1964 and 55 in 1965, according to Martin. Only about 7 per cent of the animals Schaller saw were fawns, too few to hold the herd at its size.

Martin names hunting and the loss of habitat as the heavy pressures on the species. The Wildlife Institute of India profile adds that tiger shows staged with bait had drawn tigers into the grassland the deer used. Citing Panwar’s 1973 Forest Department report, it says the herd began to increase once the park put part of it in an enclosure and stopped the shows.

The date of the low point differs by source. Martin’s paper, the Kanha reserve’s website and Amar Ujala’s January and October 2026 reports give 1970. Down To Earth and Tehelka give 1967. The sources do not reconcile the two, and this article uses 1970.

Villages out, fences in

Martin records that the forest village of Sonph was moved out of the park in 1969. Its meadow then became the herd’s main ground in the growing season and its main fawning area, with six of the eight newborn fawns he found. A 28-hectare enclosure of carnivore-proof wire mesh, built before his study to breed barasingha, held seven animals in 1972. He estimated the herd at 93 in 1971 and 133 in 1973, and says Panwar told him the herd reached approximately 150 in 1974 to 1975.

Later work followed the same lines. Amar Ujala reports that the department moved forest villages out and turned the cleared land into grassland, built ponds and small dams for water, and tightened anti-poaching patrols and monitoring.

Tehelka’s September 2023 report from Kanha describes the fawning routine. Females are kept inside fences from August and September, when jackals and pythons take newborns, and the fencing is python-proof. The magazine names Jodha Baiga, an Adivasi man who looks after the female deer and once caught pythons to protect the fawns. Beat guard Ramesh Rahangdale told Tehelka that staff count the herd daily.

The count, and why the figures differ

The published numbers are a patchwork from forest counts, estimates and press notes over fifty years. The Wildlife Institute of India profile cites a maximum of 500 in 1988, and the same undated profile also quotes a personal-communication estimate of 300 to 350. Down To Earth reported about 450 in 2015 and, attributing the figure to park authorities, about 800 in 2020. The Kanha reserve’s website gives around 1,050 and says the deer are confined to the core zone. Tehelka in September 2023, the Madhya Pradesh Forest Department in January 2026 and the Satpura study in 2026 give around 1,100.

The newest figure is from Amar Ujala on 18 October 2026, which reports the Kanha population as above 1,100 and says park management aims to take it past 1,500. None of these is a single, continuous series, and tuput found no published count that applies one method across the period. For comparison, how India counts its tigers and lions describes the camera-trap method used for tigers, which barasingha counts do not use.

A second herd, built to a plan

Awasthi, a member of the IUCN’s Deer Specialist Group, told Mongabay India that confining the whole subspecies to Kanha created “a single point of failure”. Small isolated herds, she said, face swings in numbers, inbreeding and outside threats such as disease. Without room to disperse, she added, crowding in Kanha’s finite grassland could eventually limit growth.

Down To Earth reported in 2020 that an early move to Bandhavgarh had not worked out. In 2015 the Forest Department began again, with permission from the National Tiger Conservation Authority and the environment ministry, according to the Satpura paper. Satpura’s website says the reserve held barasingha until around the 1920s, and the paper calls it part of the subspecies’ range a century ago.

The 2026 paper, published in the Conservation Evidence Journal, sets out the method. Deer were caught in a funnel-shaped pen called a boma, without darts or drugs, and moved in vehicles built for the job. They were released first into a 50-hectare enclosure at Bori in Satpura, with python-proof fencing and a solar-powered electric wire. Sixteen came in 2015, and the total reached 33 by 2017. No deer were moved in 2018 and 2019, while the enclosed herd grew to 72. In 2019, 51 were released into 185 hectares of open Bori grassland. Later groups, including 20 each in 2022 and 2023, went directly to the 400-hectare Malini grassland in Churna range.

The habitat work came first. According to the paper, Satpura moved 49 villages out from 2002, freeing more than 10,000 hectares, a figure Awasthi repeated to Mongabay India. Staff sowed tall grasses such as kangaroo grass and wild sugarcane, grew hydrilla in nurseries as water forage, and uprooted lantana and congress weed at the start of each monsoon. Satpura’s field director, L. Krishnamoorthy, told Indian Masterminds in 2023 that about 1,800 chital had been moved in from Pench to the grasslands, partly as other prey for predators. The authors put the project’s total cost at US$59,529.

What nine years of monitoring show

By 2023 the Satpura herd stood at 172: 38 males, 77 females and 57 fawns, across the enclosure and the two open grasslands. The authors measured a growth rate of 0.21 a year (standard error 0.02) and found wild-born fawns every year. Body-condition scores for the Satpura deer did not differ significantly from the Kanha deer used as a reference.

The authors recorded 29 deaths among translocated and wild-born deer, mostly from predation by leopards and dholes and from natural causes, with no disease outbreak. Fourteen deaths fell in 2019, the year of the first release from the enclosure. Fawn counts varied, with six in 2019 against an average of fourteen. The authors had no separate control site and say deaths in remote areas may have gone unseen. Awasthi cautioned in Mongabay India that long-term success depends on continued management, and that tiger, leopard and dhole predation, climate variability and the need to keep genetic diversity will shape the herd’s future.

Other herds and the January 2026 move

Down To Earth reported that five deer went to Bhopal’s Van Vihar National Park in 2015, and The Hitavada says seven were moved there. Amar Ujala reports that Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve has received barasingha since 2021, with 19 in March 2023 and 18 in May 2023, and 48 in all.

On Saturday 17 January 2026, Amar Ujala reported, 12 more left Kanha for Satpura, a road trip of about six hours. The Hitavada says they were eight adult females and four fawns, caught by boma at Saunf ground in the Sarhi range with approval from the National Tiger Conservation Authority. It credits Kanha’s Field Director Ravindra Mani Tripathi, Deputy Director Puneet Goyal and the wildlife veterinarian Dr Sandeep Agrawal, and says 115 had gone to Satpura before.

The tallies differ by source. The Satpura paper counts 98 moved through 2023, and the Hitavada’s 115 and 12 cover the period to January 2026. Anish Andheria of the nonprofit Wildlife Conservation Trust told Mongabay India in April 2026 that 135 had been moved between 2015 and 2026, with 303 now in Satpura, and that the 48 sent to Bandhavgarh had grown to 64. Amar Ujala’s October report puts Satpura above 300 and says another group is being readied for Bandhavgarh this year. The other much-reported deer recovery in the country, the sangai’s, is covered in our Keibul Lamjao piece, and another Madhya Pradesh translocation in our Project Cheetah piece.

Status in the IUCN Red List

The IUCN lists the species, Rucervus duvaucelii, as Vulnerable under criterion C1, last assessed on 10 January 2015 by J. W. Duckworth, N. S. Kumar, C. P. Pokharel, H. Sagar Baral and R. Timmins. The page records the population trend as decreasing and severely fragmented, lists the species as extant in India and Nepal and extinct in Bangladesh and Pakistan, and flags the assessment as needing an update. It covers the species as a whole, not the Kanha subspecies. The Wildlife Institute of India profile lists the species under Schedule I of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972, and in Appendix I of CITES.

As of 2 November 2026, the target Kanha’s management has stated, according to Amar Ujala, is a herd of more than 1,500.