An Eco-Sensitive Zone, also called an Ecologically Fragile Area, is a legally demarcated buffer strip around a national park or wildlife sanctuary, notified under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986. It is not a second protected area: it is a transition belt in which activities such as mining, quarrying, polluting industry and large construction are regulated or prohibited, so that the sharp edge between a strictly protected habitat and an ordinary human landscape is softened. The standard image used for it is a shock absorber. The width is the whole argument. A wide buffer keeps the corridors and floodplain approaches free of construction but places restrictions on towns and farmland outside the park; a narrow one frees land for roads, resorts and stadiums but brings development to the boundary line. Kaziranga's case is unusual in that no final notification has ever been issued for it, which is why an interim judicial default has been governing the area rather than a tailored, mapped zone.

The dispute is a clean example of the conservation-versus-development trade-off that examiners like, because both sides have a real case. Assam argues that a ten-kilometre belt of restrictions around a park sitting in a densely settled floodplain freezes livelihoods and public works in Bokakhat and Kaliabor, and that the Supreme Court's own 2023 modification says zones must be tailored to each protected area rather than fixed uniformly. Conservationists reply that Kaziranga is not a typical park: it floods every monsoon, and its animals survive by walking out of the inundated grasslands into the Karbi Anglong highlands along corridors that are longer than a kilometre. Narrow the buffer and quarrying, resorts and highway-side construction can legally close those routes, at which point the park's rhino population - roughly two-thirds of the world total - loses its flood refuge. Note also the procedural point: the state's announcement is not the decision. A proposal must go to the MoEFCC, which issues a draft notification inviting objections before any final ESZ is notified.