Lawachara National Park faces encroachment, tree theft and visitor pressure

Lawachara National Park in Kamalganj upazila of Moulvibazar, one of the best-known forests of north-eastern Bangladesh, was losing trees, land and wildlife 30 years after it was declared a national park, according to a report published by Jagonews24 on 8 April 2026. The report, by the paper's Moulvibazar district correspondent Mahidul Islam, said the boundary of the 1,250-hectare park had never been fixed on the ground, that theft of valuable trees, bamboo and cane had become routine, that much forest land had been occupied, and that traffic on the road and railway through the forest was killing animals. Local people, a visitor and an environmental campaigner quoted in the report said the Forest Department had failed to take control of the forest; the department's wildlife officials said they had written to the settlement office about the boundary and that visitors and drivers ignored the rules.

Lawachara was declared a national park in 1996. The report said the forest was losing its character: it was less dense than before, animal numbers had fallen, and a shortage of food and water had appeared. It said the Forest Department did not know how far the forest's boundary ran and had no control over the road and the railway that cross it.

According to the report, the boundary had not been fixed in the 30 years since the declaration, although the department had several times tried to have it demarcated through the Zonal Settlement Office. Many owners of land next to the forest had occupied forest land, some planting gardens on it, and others had taken forest land along with their own private plots. When the department occasionally ran drives to recover the land, the absence of boundary marks hampered the work.

Because the forest is open on all sides and a road runs through it, the report said, trees, bamboo, cane and other valuable material were easily stolen, and theft had risen alarmingly over the past two decades, damaging the forest's density and the animals' habitat. A maximum speed of 20 kilometres an hour had been set for the road and the railway inside the forest but was not enforced in practice. With vehicles and trains running round the clock, animals were regularly crushed under wheels, and some were electrocuted on power lines.

In the dry season, the report said, the forest streams dry up, leaving animals short of water as well as food. Many then move into villages in search of food, and some are killed by people. Visitors and others told the paper that the forest had once been the largest refuge of the endangered hoolock gibbon, which could easily be seen on entering, but that the animals now commonly seen were monkeys, pythons and wild boar.

Shahan Ali, a visitor from Chattogram, told Jagonews24: "A few of us friends came to visit Lawachara forest, but the condition of the forest is very bad. Apart from monkeys, no other animal can be seen. Tourists are dumping rubbish everywhere. The forest department must take strict steps to bring the forest under proper rules." Two local residents, Abid Hasan and Musa Ahmed, said: "As time goes on, the forest's condition gets worse. Animals are dying all the time on the railway and roads inside the forest. Trees and bamboo are regularly being cleared from the forest. The forest's old environment is gone."

The report said that in recent years extra visitors had come during holidays, especially Eid. Some bought tickets, but most, according to the report, entered without one because the forest is open on all sides. Many ignored the department's instructions, dropped litter wherever they went and made noise inside the forest, disturbing the animals' natural surroundings.

Asm Saleh Sohel, a member of the executive council of Bangladesh Poribesh Andolon (BAPA), told the paper: "Lawachara's natural environment should be restored as soon as possible. It is very necessary to recover the occupied land of the forest and mark its boundary. Whatever the animals need must be done, but nothing should be done that causes the animals suffering." He added that trees and bamboo were being cleared and the forest's density had fallen, that protecting them was the Forest Department's responsibility, and that visitor entry should be stopped for six months a year.

The Forest Department's Wildlife Management and Nature Conservation Division told the paper there was no food shortage in the forest, and that herds of wild boar sometimes went into paddy fields when the rice ripened. It said a letter had been sent to the Sylhet Zonal Settlement Office to fix the boundary, and that a 20-kilometre speed limit had been set for vehicles and trains on the road and railway, but that nobody wanted to obey it. Several signboards gave instructions to visitors, the division said, and most visitors read them but did not follow them.

Mohammad Kazi Nazmul Haque, a range officer of the division, said everything necessary was being done to protect the animals. "Too many people are entering the forest, which is very hard to control. The forest department has issued instructions several times to keep the road and railway through the forest under control, but no one follows them," he said.

Md Abul Kalam, the division's divisional forest officer in Sylhet, said: "Because of population growth, the number of vehicles on the roads has risen. The number of tourists has also risen, and it cannot be controlled." He said a letter had been sent to the Zonal Settlement Office to fix the boundary, and that visitors inside the forest could not be controlled and were spoiling the environment with litter. Rejecting the claim of a food shortage, he said the animals generally live on leaves and creepers.

Sonia Sultana, acting charge officer of the Sylhet Zonal Settlement Office, said she had received no letter about a forest survey. "I have not received any letter from the forest department about surveying Lawachara forest. If a letter has come, I will have to check at the office. If an application is made to us, steps will be taken for a forest survey," she said.

Lawachara is part of the West Bhanugach Reserved Forest. A secondary-data report prepared in November 2003 by Nature Conservation Management (NACOM) for the USAID-supported forest co-management project of the Ministry of Environment and Forest records that the park was created by a gazette notification dated 7 July 1996 under the Bangladesh Wildlife (Preservation) Order 1973, as amended by an act of 1974. The notified area was 1,250 hectares, made up of blocks 3 and 4 of the reserve, which were established in 1921 and 1927, and a further 281 hectares of the reserve had been proposed for inclusion. Under that law, the report noted, hunting, killing, capturing or disturbing wildlife, cutting trees and clearing land for cultivation or mining were all prohibited in the park.

Banglapedia's entry on Kamalganj upazila, which covers 485.26 square kilometres on the border with the Indian states of Tripura and Assam, lists Lawachara among the upazila's sights with the same figures: 1,250 hectares, declared a national park in 1996. A management plan prepared in October 2006 by International Resources Group for USAID's Nishorgo Support Project describes the park as crossed by a paved road and a railway linking Sreemangal, nearly 8 kilometres west of its south-western edge, with Kamalganj, nearly 2 kilometres east of its eastern edge.

The forest itself is largely man-made. According to the 2003 report, planting in the reserve began as early as 1923 and continued until 1984, first with long-rotation trees such as teak, mahogany, gamari, champa and agar along with native species such as chapalish, chikrashi and garjan, and later mostly with fast-growing exotic trees such as acacia, mangium and eucalyptus. Almost all of the original mixed tropical evergreen cover was removed or altered. The old plantations of the 1920s have since grown into a multi-storeyed, semi-evergreen forest in which tall deciduous trees stand over an evergreen understorey. Only small remnants of rich natural forest survive, the most notable an unlogged research plot of 8.6 hectares kept by the Bangladesh Forest Research Institute (BFRI).

People have long lived in and around the forest. The 2003 report counted two villages inside the park, both of the Khasi community: Magurchhara Punji, set up around 1950, and Lawachara Punji, from the 1940s. Their households grow betel leaf on forest land allotted to them by the Forest Department in return for help with plantation work and patrols. Dolubari, a Tripura village, lies at the south-western edge, and several villages on the north-eastern side were settled by migrants. The 2006 plan counted 18 villages and six tea estates within the park's zone of influence.

The missing boundary that the April 2026 report described has been noted in official plans for two decades. The 2003 NACOM report says the 1996 gazette notification describes the boundary in detail: it starts at a Forest Department pillar at the south-western corner of the reserve, next to the 11-kilometre post of the Sreemangal-Bhanugach road, and runs through a series of numbered survey stations back to that starting point.

A management plan prepared in 1996, when the park was declared, already listed "boundary definition, marking and regulations" among its key elements, the 2003 report records. Ten years later, the October 2006 management plan stated that "no efforts have so far been made to physically demarcate the boundaries in the field", and that heavy pressure and large-scale encroachment had fragmented the forest, leaving limited wildlife corridors and breeding space.

The 2006 plan also found that the park's own maps did not agree. The notified area was 1,250 hectares, but the area computed from the Forest Department's GIS database was 1,221.2 hectares, because boundaries had been traced by traditional traversing without checking against aerial photographs and had not been drawn along permanent features such as streams, roads and ridges. It recommended a survey guided by differential GPS, concrete pillars at important and turning points, signboards where the road and the railway cross the park's edges, and survey and demarcation of the whole boundary in the plan's first year.

The 2003 report recorded encroachment as well. Forest villagers had been allotted 1.2 hectares per household for betel leaf but were using much more; about 10 hectares of the park had been turned into farmland by outside villagers; and about 556 acres of forest land outside the park had been reported encroached by three neighbouring villages.

The issue was back on the government's agenda a few months before the report. When the interim government's advisory council approved a new wildlife ordinance in early December 2025, the environment adviser, Syeda Rizwana Hasan, told Prothom Alo that the Forest Department would carry out the work of marking forest boundaries so that forest land would not be newly occupied.

The 2006 plan set out why the transport corridors matter for the park: traffic noise disturbs wildlife, the cleared strips are barriers to the movement of animals, they give illegal fellers easy access, and the highway brings visitors straight into the park. A power transmission line runs largely parallel to the road. The 2003 report, using figures from about 2000, put the traffic at about 25 vehicles an hour on the road and 24 train movements a day on the Dhaka-Sylhet line.

Deaths of animals on these routes were reported long before 2026. In September 2013, Prothom Alo reported that researchers of the Bangladesh Python Project, working in the park since May 2011 with support from the Forest Department and the organisations Orion Society and Carinam Bangladesh, had found about a thousand dead snakes in the park area over two years, in the months from Baishakh to Kartik when snakes move most. The snakes had been run over on the Sreemangal-Bhanugach road, cut by trains on the Dhaka-Sylhet railway or killed by people in nearby tea gardens and villages. The project had recorded 39 snake species in the park, including the python and the king cobra.

The speed limit cited in the April 2026 report was also in place earlier. In January 2025, Jamil Mohammad Khan, an assistant conservator of forests in the Wildlife Management and Nature Conservation Division, told Prothom Alo that a speed of 20 kilometres had been fixed for vehicles on the road through the forest, but that nobody wanted to obey it, and that there was no parking space for visitors' vehicles.

The removal of wood from Lawachara is an old problem. The 2003 NACOM report described the park as long and heavily used by subsistence and small-scale woodcutters. Local forest staff estimated at the time that 100 to 140 people entered every day from the Sreemangal and Kamalganj sides to collect fuelwood, and one survey counted on average 233 people carrying fuelwood along the railway on non-market days and 337 on market days, taking an estimated 5.13 and 7.42 tonnes a day respectively.

The same report said there was strong evidence of illegal felling inside the park, though no hard data, carried out at night by large, often armed gangs, and that the timber taken was mainly teak and chapalish. It linked the problem to inadequate staff, poor patrol logistics and equipment and low staff morale. Among other threats it listed bark stripping for mosquito-coil makers, cattle grazing, betel-leaf cultivation that clears the undergrowth, hunting and unplanned tourism, and it called the plantation history itself "the major tragedy" of Lawachara, because clear felling and exotic monocultures had changed the forest's make-up.

The forest also bears the mark of the Magurchhara gas field blowout of June 1997. A gas field had been set up on about 10 hectares cleared at the south-eastern edge of the forest. When it exploded, the 2003 report says, it left a crater of about 200 metres, a column of flame about 75 metres high burned for about 15 days, about 5 hectares of forest to the north were completely burnt, and a forest village had to be moved. The primates moved away to safer parts of the forest.

The gibbon the visitors mentioned is the western hoolock gibbon (Hoolock hoolock). A study of the species in the reserve in 1990-91, summarised in the 2003 report, found that the gibbons live in groups of two to five, keep home ranges of 30 to 35 hectares, eat mainly fruits and figs, and spend about 39 percent of the day feeding.

In 2006 a census by Petra Österberg of Oxford Brookes University, published in Gibbon Journal in 2007, found 17 groups with 62 individuals in Lawachara and the adjoining West Bhanugach forest, one group isolated in a small fragment surrounded by villages and paddy fields. The paper said Bangladesh then had an estimated 200 to 300 western hoolocks in 22 small, isolated populations, that the species had been added to the IUCN/SSC Primate Specialist Group's list of the 25 most endangered primates for 2006-2008, and that Lawachara was likely to support the only gibbon population in the country that might remain viable into the next century.

In May 2025, Prothom Alo reported that the western hoolock gibbon and Phayre's langur had been included in the 2023-2025 edition of "Primates in Peril", the report on the world's most endangered primates published by the IUCN SSC Primate Specialist Group, Re:wild and the International Primatological Society. The paper cited a 2020 study led by Habibun Nahar of the zoology department of Jagannath University, which found that the country's gibbons had fallen from 3,000 in 1980 to 468, that habitat suitable for them covered only 294 square kilometres, and that gibbons had disappeared from 10 of the 22 forests where they were once found. A 2025 study by the German Primate Center, the paper said, found only 484 Phayre's langurs in the forests of the Sylhet region, Lawachara among them.

The chief conservator of forests, Md Amir Hossain Chowdhury, told the paper then that a gibbon conservation action plan was at the draft stage, that the loss of habitat was the biggest threat to both species, and that rope bridges had been installed in Lawachara so that the animals could cross from one patch of forest to another.

The park's species counts also need care. The 460-species figure quoted in the April 2026 report (167 plants, 4 amphibians, 6 reptiles, 246 birds and 20 mammals) matches a list compiled in the 2003 NACOM report, which added 17 species of dragonflies and damselflies and itself warned that the inventories were "incomplete, inadequate and therefore are misleading". Figures from the Wildlife Management and Nature Conservation Division cited in January 2025 put the park's reptiles at 59 species (39 snakes, 18 lizards and 2 turtles) and its amphibians at 22.

The crowds described in the April 2026 report had been growing for years. Around 2000, the 2003 report noted, some 300 buses and minibuses a month visited the park from December to February, most of them picnic groups, and visitors played loud music, chased animals and left litter. According to the park's co-management committee office, quoted by Prothom Alo in January 2025, 151,571 visitors entered Lawachara in 2024 and revenue of Tk 9,870,782 was collected. Ticket counter records showed 579 visitors on 12 December 2024, 1,369 on 13 December and 1,727 on 14 December.

In the same report, Sohel Shyam, a founder of the volunteer group Stand for Our Endangered Wildlife (SEU), said a daily limit on visitor numbers should be set and visitors should enter only with guides. Assistant conservator Jamil Mohammad Khan said officials were thinking about fixing a carrying capacity but had no instruction on it from above, and that people had been told orally not to picnic in Lawachara.

Entry fees were raised in June 2024. Prothom Alo reported that, under a Forest Department letter of 13 June 2024, the adult fee rose from Tk 50 to Tk 115, the fee for minors from Tk 20 to Tk 57.50 and the fee for foreign visitors from Tk 500 to Tk 1,150, while parking for small vehicles went from Tk 27 to Tk 115. Md Shahidul Islam, a range officer of the wildlife division in Moulvibazar, said the ministry had raised fees that year at Lawachara, Satchhari and other forests.

On 8 April 2026, wildlife and protected areas in Bangladesh were governed by the Wildlife (Conservation and Security) Ordinance 2026, in force from 7 January 2026, which replaced the Wildlife (Conservation and Security) Act 2012. When the advisory council approved the ordinance in December 2025, Prothom Alo reported that it brought 1,599 species of animals and plants under protection, made the killing of the 250 species in its Schedule 1(kha) a non-bailable offence, as it already was for tigers and elephants, and allowed forest officials and law enforcers to arrest suspected offenders without a warrant.

The chapter on protected areas in the 2026 law, in the text on the government's Laws of Bangladesh website, says sanctuaries and national parks are to be declared with specific boundaries, and that the Forest Department must prepare a management plan for each one and carry it out once the government approves it. Inside a sanctuary or national park it bars, among other things, unauthorised entry, cultivation, cutting plants except for silvicultural operations, dumping rubbish and waste, harassing or frightening wildlife, bringing in domestic animals and picnicking. It bans new industries, commercial establishments and brick kilns within 2 kilometres of a park's boundary. Visitors may enter a national park for ecotourism with the permission of the chief wildlife warden or an authorised officer, subject to an entry fee, and the government may run co-management with forest-dwelling ethnic minorities and local people.

Photo: Abdulmominbd / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sources: Jagonews24 (8 April 2026), Nature Conservation Management (NACOM) secondary data report on Lawachara National Park (November 2003), Management Plans for Lawachara National Park (International Resources Group for USAID, October 2006), Gibbon Journal No. 3 (2007), Prothom Alo (11 September 2013, 16 June 2024, 18 January 2025, 5 May 2025, 6 December 2025), Banglapedia, Laws of Bangladesh (Legislative and Parliamentary Affairs Division)