guindy children park september 2024

Guindy National Park is a protected area, located in Chennai, India. Spread across 2.70 km2 (1.04 sq mi), it is one of the smallest National Parks in India and one of the few national parks situated inside a metropolitan area. The park is an extension of the grounds surrounding Raj Bhavan, the official residence of the Governor of Tamil Nadu and encloses forests, scrub lands, lakes and streams.
The park has a role in both ex situ and in situ conservation and is home to a variety of species including a wide variety of snakes, geckos, tortoises, over 130 species of birds, 14 species of mammals including 400 blackbucks, 2,000 spotted deer, 24 jackals, over 60 species of butterflies and spiders each and other invertebrates. These are free-ranging fauna that live with minimal interference from human beings. Guindy Snake Park, formerly the location of Madras Crocodile Bank Trust and Children's Park are located next to the park in the same premises. As of 2007, the parks had 700,000 annual visitors.
History
Covering an area of 5 km2 (1.93 sq mi), the park was one of the last remnants of tropical dry evergreen forest along the Coromandel Coast and was originally a game reserve. In the early 1670s, a garden space was carved out of the area and a residence called the Guindy Lodge was built by Governor William Langhorne (1672-1678) for recreation. The remaining of the forest area was owned by Gilbert Rodericks, from whom it was purchased by the Government of Madras in 1821 for a sum of ₹ 35,000. The original area of 505 ha (1,250 acres) was established as a Reserve Forest in 1910.[2][3][4]
Between 1961 and 1977, about 172 ha (430 acres) of the forest, was transferred to various government departments in order to build educational institutions and memorials.[5] In 1958, a portion of the forest area was transferred to the Union Education Ministry for establishing the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT). In the same year, a portion of the land was transferred to the Tamil Nadu Forest Department for creating the Guindy Deer Park and Children's Park under the direction of then Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. Memorials for Rajaji and Kamaraj were built in 1974 and 1975, respectively, from parcels of land acquired from the reserve. In 1977, the remaining forest area was transferred to the Forest Department and in 1978, it was declared a national park. It was walled off from the adjacent Raj Bhavan and IIT Madras in the late 1980s
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