Omid No More
A pair of Siberian cranes in Keoladeo Ghana, February 1994. Photo: Bernard Dupont/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
Keoladeo Ghana, popularly called Bharatpur, was declared a national park in 1982 and a UNESCO World Heritage ‘Natural’ Site in 1985. The site originated in 1850 as a man-made hunting reserve for the Maharaja Suraj Mal of Bharatpur.
The hunting reserve was popular among the royalty, the British and the armed forces alike. There is a stone plaque here that describes a hunting excess from 1902 to 1964. In this time, the ‘highest score’ went to Viceroy Lord Chelmsford, who killed 4,206 waterfowl using 50 guns, on November 20, 1916. The last engraved hunt is that of General J.N. Chaudhuri, chief of the army staff, who on February 23, 1964, killed 556 waterfowl using 51 guns in just half a day.