On the sixth day of Navratri — the day devoted to Maa Katyayani, the warrior goddess who slew Mahishasura — Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma invoked a very earthly parallel: the 108 women who patrol the wilderness of Kaziranga National Park as the state's first frontline female forest guards, the Van Durgas.

Who are the Van Durgas — and how they came to be

In August 2023, the Assam government recruited the inaugural cohort of 108 women as frontline forest guards for Kaziranga — one of the world's most consequential wildlife habitats and a UNESCO World Heritage Site famed for its population of the greater one-horned rhinoceros. These were not women plucked from urban campuses. They are daughters of farming families, trained at the 11th Assam Police Battalion in Dergaon, and deployed into one of India's most demanding patrol environments.

Their beat covers Kaziranga's dense grasslands and forests by vehicle, on foot, and — critically — by boat during the annual floods that inundate the park each monsoon season. The animals they protect include not only the iconic one-horned rhino but also elephants, tigers and wild buffalo. Poachers do not take days off during the floods. Neither do the Van Durgas.

The Navratri thread: Katyayani, the Yamuna, and the forests of Assam

Sarma's post wove together myth and ground reality with deliberate intent. The Katyayani tradition — in which the gopis (cowherd women) of Vrindavan worshipped the goddess on the banks of the Yamuna to invoke her protection — becomes a lens for the Van Durgas' own vigil in Assam's forests. 'When our daughters guard our forests, they guard Assam's identity itself,' he wrote. It is a framing that ties biodiversity conservation directly to cultural continuity — Kaziranga's rhinos as both ecological treasure and civilisational symbol.

PM Modi's visit and what it signalled

Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Kaziranga National Park and met with the women guards, describing their courage as 'truly inspiring.' The Prime Minister's direct engagement with the Van Durgas lent the initiative national visibility — rare for a state-level forest department recruitment drive.

A recruitment model that could travel

The Van Durga initiative is part of a broader pattern in Assam of integrating gender inclusion into hard conservation infrastructure — not symbolic desk postings, but multi-modal, flood-season field patrols in a UNESCO site. The recruits come from the same rural farming communities whose livelihoods coexist, sometimes tensely, with wildlife corridors. Putting those communities' daughters at the front of conservation work changes the relationship between villages and the park in ways that top-down enforcement rarely achieves.

Whether the model expands to other protected areas in the Northeast — Manas, Dibru-Saikhowa, Nameri — and whether Assam's forest department budget reflects a second recruitment tranche will be the real measure of its institutional staying power. For now, on the day of the warrior goddess, Sarma made sure the country knew: Assam already has its Katyayanis — and they carry patrol logs, not just prayers.