Dampa Tiger Reserve

About Dampa Tiger Reserve

Dampa Tiger Reserve, in Mizoram's Mamit district on the state's western edge, is the largest protected area in Mizoram and one of Northeast India's most important tiger landscapes. It covers 988 sq km in total, made up of a 545 sq km core Critical Tiger Habitat and a 488 sq km buffer zone, after the core was expanded in 2018 to bring in the Serhmun village forest that had previously served as buffer. Dampa was brought under Project Tiger in 1994, formalising decades of earlier protection as a wildlife sanctuary. It sits along Mizoram's border with Bangladesh, and its terrain of steep hills, fast-flowing streams, and near-continuous forest cover has made it one of the least disturbed large forest blocks in the region. Lower elevations carry moist deciduous forest, giving way to tropical wet evergreen and semi-evergreen forest across most of the reserve. While Dampa is officially a tiger reserve, its standout wildlife distinction is arguably its clouded leopard population: camera-trap studies have recorded the highest density of clouded leopards found anywhere in India within Dampa's forests, a genuinely rare superlative for a species that is notoriously difficult to document. The reserve also supports leopard, Asian elephant, hoolock gibbon, and swamp deer, alongside a rich understorey and canopy fauna typical of relatively undisturbed evergreen forest. Dampa remains comparatively little-visited next to central Indian tiger reserves, both because of its remote western-Mizoram location and because sighting probabilities for its resident tigers are lower than in more open, grassland-heavy reserves elsewhere in India. For visitors and researchers focused on Northeast India's rainforest carnivores specifically, though, Dampa's clouded leopard density makes it one of the most scientifically significant reserves in the region.