General Information About Panna National Park

Being located in the northeast of Madhya Pradesh in the Panna and Chattarpur district, it is a national reserve specially designed for tigers. The nearest flowing river to this park is river Ken. The nearest stations to this national reserve are Panna and Khajuraho. From Panna the journey becomes of 25 km, and from Khajuraho, it reduces to 16 km. The park encompasses an expanse of 542.667 acres lying mostly on the northern tip of the natural teak forest and the eastern tip of the natural Kardhai forest in Madhya Pradesh. To keep the animals from extinction, the park also has major governing bodies to protect it. The including governing bodies are the Government of India, Ministry of Environment, and Forest and Project tiger Madhya Pradesh.

In 1994, this reserve was announced as the twenty second Tiger Reserve of India, being fifth in Madhya Pradesh itself. However, in 2009, a major man-made disaster (i.e. Illegal poaching) devastated the place here, and gave a drastically resulted in voiding the entire tiger population. Henceforth, today it is only the chunk of wildlife habitat left in Madhya Pradesh. Though, this was genuine that the decline of tiger population was reported several times from here, but nobody took any strong action towards it. However, when the site got too critical at the period of time, then the decision of relocation of two female tigers from the Bandhavgarh national park and Kanha National Park was done in March 2009. Also, a committee was established to count after the tiger’s number.

Eventually, this park faced to down many a times in succeeding year, but the year 2009 proved to be a fateful year for the tiger population in this park. During the year, it was reported that only 2 tigress was left from 40 tigers. Thus, looking the criticality of the situation, 2 tigers were allocated to this park to bring some ups in the tiger population. However, in the next 2 years 10 were observed from the act of allocation.

Therefore, in history, the park became the second to lose all the tigers, but first to achieve first ever-breeding success in reproducing wild and orphaned semi- wild tigers. Resulting the achievements, this park was awarded as the best maintained and tourist friendly national park of the country by the ministry of tourism and government of India, on 25 January 2007.

Best time to visit Panna National Park

If you are imagining that you can come here any day of the year, then you are highly mistaken. The park is only open in certain months and has precise timings.

First lap: The first lap of the national reserve starts on 16th October and run till 31st January. The timings of the lap are 06:30 am to 11:00 am, and 02:30 pm to 05:30 pm.