"There is a great amount of risk in allowing this highly endangered animal to remain concentrated in just one or two sanctuaries and hence the idea to shift some rhinos to other parks with similar environs," Assam Forest Minister Pradyut Bordoloi told AFP.

"We hope the translocation project would help Assam to attain a total rhino population of 3,000 by 2020."

According to the state's most recent wildlife census, 2,000 of India's estimated 2,400 rhinos roam the thick savannah grasslands of Assam, with the Kaziranga National Park in eastern Assam housing more than 1,600.

As part of the relocation project, called India Rhino Vision 2020, experts will shift rhinos from Kaziranga and Pabitora National Park to five other sanctuaries in the state, hit by a separatist insurgency that has killed at least 15,000 since 1979, starting next year.

Wildlife officials call Pabitora, near Assam's main city of Guwahati, the world's most densely populated rhino reserve with about 80 of the animals living in 38 square kilometers (15 square miles).

"The main objectives of rhino translocation were to establish a viable breeding population in other areas and to safeguard this endangered species from natural calamities such as flood and epidemics," said M.C. Malakar, the state's chief wildlife warden.

The five new locations selected for the rhino translocation project are the Manas, Orang and Dibru Saikhowa national parks and the Laokhowa and Burachaporo-Kochmora wildlife sanctuaries in Assam.

The global wildlife conservation group, the World Wildlife Fund is supporting the project with funds and technical expertise.

From five rhinos a century ago, the Kaziranga National Park, about 220 kilometers (135 miles) from Guwahati, is now home to the single largest population of the endangered one-horned rhinoceros in the world.

"To find the Kaziranga rhinos charging back from the brink of extinction is perhaps the world's biggest conservation success stories," Kaziranga park director N.K. Vasu said.

But organized poachers still hunt the animal for its horn, long believed to be an aphrodisiac, and have killed as many as 600 of the rhinos at Kaziranga between 1985 and 2000.

Rhino horn is made of keratin -- the same protein that covers cow horn -- and is used in traditional Chinese medicine as well as in parts of South Asia to cure fevers and other ailments.

The horn also attracts Middle East buyers who use whole horns to make the handles of ornamental daggers.

State officials estimate that poachers earn about 100,000 rupeesdollars) for a dead rhino, and horn fetches up to 34,000 dollars a kilo (15,000 dollars a pound) on the international market.

The horn from a full-grown rhino can weigh up to two kilograms.

The beasts, which can weigh over two tonnes, once ranged from Pakistan across northern India to Nepal and the border with Myanmar, and perhaps even into southern China. Today most live in reserves in India and Nepal's Royal Chitwan National Park.

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