Central India

Kanha National Park, in the Maikal hills of Madhya Pradesh, is widely believed to have inspired the setting of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, and is the site of one of Indian conservation's clearest success stories: the hard-ground barasingha (swamp deer), reduced to a few dozen individuals in the 1960s, was nursed back to a stable population through a dedicated captive-breeding and habitat programme and is now found nowhere else in the wild in this subspecies.

Bandhavgarh National Park, centred on an ancient hill fort said to predate the Ramayana in local legend, has one of the highest tiger densities of any reserve in the country, making it one of the most reliable parks in India for tourist tiger sightings.

Pench National Park, straddling the Madhya Pradesh–Maharashtra border along the Pench river, is also closely associated with the Jungle Book landscape (Kipling is thought to have drawn on accounts of this forest as well as Kanha) and is known for high leopard and wild dog (dhole) densities.

Panna National Park suffered a complete local extinction of its tiger population by around 2009 due to poaching, and was subsequently repopulated through a carefully monitored reintroduction of tigers from Bandhavgarh and Kanha — now cited as one of India's most successful tiger reintroduction programmes, alongside Sariska.

Satpura National Park, part of a larger tiger reserve in the Satpura hill range, is valued by wildlife-watchers for its rugged, less-visited terrain that permits walking and canoe safaris (unusual among Indian tiger reserves, most of which restrict visitors to vehicles).

Van Vihar National Park is a unique small park located inside Bhopal city itself, functioning partly as a rescue-and-rehabilitation centre for injured or orphaned wild animals alongside its role as a public park.

Achanakmar Tiger Reserve, part of the Achanakmar-Amarkantak Biosphere Reserve near the Narmada river's source, links Chhattisgarh's forests with Kanha to its east, forming part of a larger central Indian tiger corridor.

Guru Ghasidas National Park (earlier known as Sanjay National Park before renaming) adjoins the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve landscape and was renamed in honour of the 18th-century Satnami social reformer Guru Ghasidas.

Indravati National Park, in the Bastar region, is one of the few remaining habitats of the wild buffalo (arna) in central India and also historically held one of India's last populations of the Bengal florican, though insurgency-related access restrictions have made recent wildlife monitoring difficult.

Kanger Valley National Park, also in Bastar, is distinctive for the Kotumsar limestone caves within its boundaries — one of the very few Indian national parks with a significant subterranean/speleological feature alongside its forest ecosystem.

Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve, Maharashtra's oldest and largest national park, centred on Tadoba Lake, has become one of the state's most visited tiger destinations and takes its name from the local deity Taru, worshipped by tribal communities as protector of the forest.

Memory hook (Madhya Pradesh's six, restated as pure recall): see the "Sanjay and Madhav" peg under State Memory Pegs — but if you want a shorter drill version: "Kanha Bites Pench, Panna Sits, Van waits" → Kanha, Bandhavgarh, Pench, Panna, Satpura, Van Vihar.

Memory hook (Chhattisgarh's four): "Achanak (suddenly), Guru ate wild buffalo from Indravati, then hid in Kanger's limestone cave." Achanakmar → Guru Ghasidas → Indravati → Kanger Valley.

Memory hook (Maharashtra's one, in this section): "Tadoba is oldest and largest, full stop" — the two superlatives glued to the one name so you never need to recall which park they belong to.

Practice Recall: Before reading on, name all six of Madhya Pradesh's National Parks listed in this book.

Answer: Kanha, Bandhavgarh, Pench, Panna, Satpura, Van Vihar.

Practice Recall: Name Chhattisgarh's four National Parks/Tiger Reserves.

Answer: Achanakmar, Guru Ghasidas (Sanjay), Indravati, Kanger Valley.