Place · tiger reserve & national park · India
Betla National Park
Betla, 1,026 square kilometres of sal and bamboo forest in Latehar district, was among the first nine Project Tiger reserves of 1973 and before that the Palamu game preserve of the Maharajas of Palamu and the Dalton school of forestry's teaching ground. The park contains the old and new Palamu forts, several Chero temple ruins, and the first census of a wild tiger population by Pugmark Count anywhere in India, undertaken here in 1932 by Jhabua state forester Dharm Kumar Sinhji. It carries one of the few central Indian wild elephant herds that still migrates seasonally into the Betla-Mahuadanr landscape from the Chotanagpur plateau.
- Function
- Landscape & environmental change
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 23.867, 84.183
Connections (1)
- Site withinPalamu Forts
The old and new Palamu forts stand on opposite ridges above the Auranga river inside what is now Betla National Park, part of the Palamu Tiger Reserve declared under Project Tiger in 1973. The park's boundary was drawn to include both forts, which belonged to the Chero kingdom of Medini Rai and his son Pratap Rai in the seventeenth century. The forts were taken by the Mughal subahdar of Patna Daud Khan Qureshi in 1660 and by the British in 1770; their stone, teak and sal timbers were used across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for colonial public works at Daltonganj and Latehar.
Sources
Standard reference.
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