Chincholi: The Dry Forest That Got Protected Last

India protects its wet forest first. That is not a rule anybody wrote down, but look at a map of South Indian sanctuaries and it is unmistakable — a dense chain down the Western Ghats, and a thin scatter across the whole dry Deccan interior. Rain forest photographs well, holds tigers and elephants, and had a colonial hunting-and-forestry bureaucracy paying attention to it for a century. Thorn scrub over rocky ground did not.

So when Karnataka notified 14,958 hectares of the Chincholi taluk in 2011 — 134.88 sq km, its twenty-first sanctuary — Chincholi Wildlife Sanctuary became the first dry-land wildlife sanctuary in South India. Not the first dry forest. The first one anybody bothered to protect.

What the dry forest actually holds

The core is dry and moist deciduous woodland, with acacia and teak plantations on the fringes and stands of sandalwood (ಶ್ರೀಗಂಧ) and red sanders (ರಕ್ತಚಂದನ) that the forest department names among its reasons for protecting the block. Chandrampalli reservoir and four smaller dams carry the water through a summer that is genuinely brutal on this plateau.

The animal that put Chincholi in the scientific literature arrived by accident. Between 16 October and 20 November 2023 a team from the Holématthi Nature Foundation and the Nature Conservation Foundation set 104 camera traps across the sanctuary and its adjoining reserved forests, meaning to count leopards. What they got instead, at nine of those locations, was the dhole — the Asiatic wild dog. Twenty photographs, twelve independent events, every one of a single animal in daylight, never a pack.

The last time anyone had documented a dhole in the Kalyana-Karnataka region was the Mysore State Gazetteer for Gulbarga district, in 1966. The nearest known populations are roughly 400 km away at Bhimgad in the Western Ghats and 200 km away near Amrabad in the Eastern Ghats, and the IUCN's own assessment of the species' range does not include this area at all. The authors published it under the title "Rediscovering dholes in the Deccan Plateau" and recommended extending the sanctuary from 134.88 to 175.38 sq km to take in the three reserved forests where some of the animals turned up.

The rest of the survey is less cheerful. In 1,650 camera-trap days they recorded exactly one leopard. Golden jackal was the common canid, with 83 independent events against twelve each for the dhole and the Bengal fox. The paper's reading is blunt: both the leopard and the dhole are at a bottleneck here and could disappear locally without deliberate intervention, with feral dogs among the named threats. The prey base — chital, four-horned antelope, nilgai, blackbuck, wild pig, langur, porcupine, peafowl — is there; the predators are hanging on by very little.

If you see a species list for Chincholi that includes gaur, put it down: gaur is a Western Ghats animal, and lists like that are copied rather than counted.

The bird count nobody has settled

The official Karnataka Tourism listing says "over 35 species of birds". A Kannada newspaper account of the sanctuary puts it past 160. Neither figure is doing much work: one photographer's Wikimedia Commons uploads from a handful of 2020 visits alone run to more than thirty species, including a white-bellied minivet — a scarce, barely-studied bird of open dry scrub — and a sirkeer malkoha, and eight different cuckoos in one season. Take the 35 as a floor and the sanctuary as under-recorded.

Getting inside it — which until recently you could not

For thirteen years after notification there was no visitor route into Chincholi at all. That changed in late 2024, when a marked forest trek from Chandrampalli opened to the public — billed by the minister who launched it as South India's first deciduous-forest trek. There are two routes: a long one of about 8 to 9 km from the Chandrampalli nature camp through the forest to Gottamgotta, where the Bakkaprabhu temple and a botanical garden sit deep inside the boundary, and a short 4 km circuit near the dam. Accounts differ on whether the long route is 8 km or 9; the department's own launch said 9.

In March 2026 a jungle safari, boating on the Chandrampalli reservoir and tented accommodation were added. It is worth being clear that this is all very new, lightly staffed, and nothing like the machinery at Bandipur or Nagarhole. Book ahead, expect the arrangements to have changed since anything you read, and confirm the fee when you book — no official tariff is published anywhere we could find, and the figures circulating in the press (₹200 an adult for the long route, ₹100 for the short) are reported rather than confirmed.

The other correction worth making: a great deal of writing about Chincholi puts it "about 60 km east of Kalaburagi". That is roughly the straight line. By road the trek start is 87 km from the Kalaburagi bus station and the town 78 km — and Bidar, at 57 km, and Humnabad, at 55 km, are both nearer than the district headquarters. The nearest useful railhead is Tandur, 31 km away and across the border in Telangana.

The hamlets inside the boundary

Lambani tandas — hamlets of a scheduled tribal community — lie inside the sanctuary; one of them, Sheribikanahalli, appears on the map at the middle of the protected block. Since January 2025 the district administration and the forest department have been trying to persuade its residents to move out to Venkatapur, 13 km away, where 58 acres have been identified: 56 for cultivation and two for housing. Reports give 98 families and 219 people, and a package of either ₹15 lakh per family or two acres of land plus ₹10 lakh, with government housing benefits on top. Nothing has been reported since about whether they went.

It is the oldest argument in Indian conservation and there is no version of this page that settles it. What a visitor can do is remember, walking past a tanda on the way to a viewpoint, that it is somebody's home rather than part of the scenery.

What else is out that way

The Chandrampalli Dam itself, across the Mullamari — one of the main tributaries of the Bhima — is the obvious pairing, since you pass it to reach the trek. Further west, the whole Bahmani inheritance of Kalaburagi is 87 km back down the road: the moated Gulbarga Fort with its unusual covered Jama Masjid, the Haft Gumbaz tombs and the Khwaja Bande Nawaz Dargah. If you are coming from Hyderabad, Chincholi makes far more sense as its own overnight than as a stop on the way to anywhere.