Kanha Tiger Reserve, also called Kanha National Park, is one of the tiger reserves of India and the largest national park of Madhya Pradesh, state in the heart of India. The present-day Kanha area is divided into two sanctuaries, Hallon and Banjar, of 250 and 300 km2 respectively. Kanha National Park was created on 1 June 1955 and in 1973 was made the Kanha Tiger Reserve. Today it stretches over an area of 940 km2 in the two districts Mandla and Balaghat.The park has a significant population of the Royal Bengal tiger, Indian leopards, the sloth bear, barasingha and Indian wild dog. The forest depicted in the famous novel by Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book is based on jungles including this reserve. It is also the first tiger reserve in India to officially introduce a mascot, “Bhoorsingh the Barasingha”.Kanha Tiger Reserve is home to over 1000 species of flowering plants.The lowland forest is a mixture of sal and other mixed-forest trees, interspersed with meadows. The highland forests are tropical moist, dry deciduous type and of a completely different nature from bamboo on slopes. A notable Indian ghost tree can also be seen in the dense forest.Kanha Tiger Reserve has species of tigers, leopards, wild dogs, wild cats, foxes and jackals. Among the deer species, swamp deer or hard-ground barasingha is the pride of the place, as it is the only subspecies of swamp deer in India, except the great swamp deer of Sundarbans. The animal is adapted to hard ground unlike swamp deer of the north, which live in marshy swamps.