Bird islands: On India’s bustard conservation programme

In October 2026, two captive-bred male Great Indian Bustards were released into the wild at Desert National Park in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan. Reared under a joint conservation programme run by the Union Environment Ministry, the Rajasthan Forest Department, and the Wildlife Institute of India, this marked the first-ever rewilding trial for this critically endangered species.

Under the National Bustard Recovery Plan initiated in 2018–19, two dedicated conservation breeding centres were established at Sam and Ramdevra within Desert National Park, Jaisalmer. Run jointly by the Wildlife Institute of India and the Rajasthan Forest Department, these centres incubate collected wild eggs and rear chicks in captivity to build a viable insurance population.

The Great Indian Bustard is classified as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List and protected under Schedule I of India’s Wildlife Protection Act, 1972. Once widely distributed across eleven Indian states, its surviving wild population has dwindled to roughly 120 individuals, with more than 90% confined to Rajasthan’s Thar Desert.

In the 1960s, renowned ornithologist Dr. Salim Ali recommended the Great Indian Bustard as India’s national bird to grant it immediate nationwide conservation status and legal protection. However, in 1963, the Indian Board for Wildlife selected the Indian peafowl (peacock) instead, citing its widespread presence across India and rich cultural symbolism.

Before the enactment of the Wildlife (Protection) Act in 1972, the Great Indian Bustard was a prized game bird targeted by British colonial officers and Indian royalty. Unregulated sport hunting and poaching severely depleted bustard populations across the subcontinent before strict legal bans were fully enforced in the late 1970s.

The expansion of the Indira Gandhi Canal network transformed Rajasthan’s arid grasslands (historically categorized in land revenue records as unproductive ‘wastelands’) into intensive agricultural plots. This rapid agrarian shift introduced chemical pesticides, fragmented open terrain with motor roads, and destroyed the primary breeding grounds of the Great Indian Bustard.

Weighing up to 15 kilograms, the Great Indian Bustard is one of the heaviest flying birds on Earth. Because of its anatomy, it has narrow frontal vision (it primarily looks downwards while scanning the ground for food), making it unable to spot thin electrical wires until it is too late to change direction, leading to lethal collisions.

In April 2021, hearing a petition by wildlife conservationist M.K. Ranjitsinh, the Supreme Court ordered that all low-voltage power lines across priority and potential bustard habitats in Rajasthan and Gujarat be converted into underground cables. It also mandated that overhead high-voltage lines be converted underground or fitted with bird flight diverters to prevent fatal electrocution.

In March 2024, the Supreme Court modified its blanket 2021 order following appeals from the Ministry of Power, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, and solar power developers. The companies argued that undergrounding high-voltage transmission lines across 99,000 square kilometres was technically unfeasible and cost-prohibitive, threatening India’s national target of achieving 500 GW of renewable energy by 2030.

The Great Indian Bustard, locally celebrated as ‘Godawan’, was declared the state bird of Rajasthan in 1981. Although it features prominently in desert folklore, state tourism campaigns, and conservation advertisements, this high-profile cultural symbolism contrasts sharply with the silent, unpublicized decline of many other lesser-known grassland birds.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and BirdLife International’s State of the World’s Birds assessment, more than 1,200 avian species globally face extinction. Habitat loss caused by industrial agriculture, deforestation, infrastructure expansion, and invasive predators represents the primary driver of this decline.

The State of India’s Birds (SoIB) 2023 report, based on millions of citizen-science observations recorded via eBird, revealed steep declines in birds once considered ubiquitous. Open-ecosystem species like the Skylark (down ~80%) and the Indian Roller (down 30% over 12 years) have suffered heavily from grassland destruction, widespread pesticide use, and rapid urbanization.

The author highlights four controversial wildlife interventions: translocating a tigress from Bihar’s Valmiki to West Bengal’s historic Buxa reserve; keeping translocated African cheetahs inside fenced enclosures in Kuno; Gujarat’s reluctance to relocate Gir lions to Kuno, causing excess lions to spill into coastal Saurashtra farmlands; and planting non-native peepal and banyan trees in the Delhi Ridge instead of restoring native semi-arid thorn forest flora.

Unlike southern African wildlife models that rely on heavily fenced game reserves to separate animals from people, India’s traditional conservation model championed peaceful coexistence in shared landscapes. However, rapid land fragmentation is driving a trend toward ‘fortress conservation’, turning national parks into isolated ecological islands that sever natural animal dispersal.

India hosts nearly 60% of the world’s wild Asian elephants. Because elephants are wide-ranging megaherbivores that require vast landscape corridors to migrate between feeding grounds, confining them to isolated protected pockets forces herds to cross cultivated fields and human habitations, causing hundreds of human casualties and heavy crop losses every year.

Landscape-level conservation shifts the focus from managing isolated protected areas for single charismatic flagship species (like tigers or bustards) toward preserving contiguous, interconnected regional ecosystems. This approach protects broader biodiversity, maintains vital animal migration corridors, and integrates human land use with wildlife coexistence.