Great Indian Bustard (Ardeotis nigriceps)

The Great Indian Bustard (Ardeotis nigriceps), known in Hindi as the godawan and locally as son chiriya, is among the heaviest flying birds on the planet, standing roughly a metre tall and weighing up to fifteen kilograms. The species is endemic to the Indian subcontinent and once ranged across the arid and semi-arid grasslands of central, western, and peninsular India and adjoining Pakistan. Its legal protection in India derives from inclusion in Schedule I of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, which confers the highest degree of statutory protection and prescribes the most severe penalties for hunting or trade. Internationally, the bird is listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List and appears in Appendix I of CITES and Appendix I of the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS), reflecting both its precarious population and its transboundary conservation requirements between India and Pakistan.

The conservation architecture for the species operates through several layered instruments. At the central level, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) administers species recovery under the Integrated Development of Wildlife Habitats scheme, which identifies the Great Indian Bustard as a priority species for recovery funding. State forest departments, principally in Rajasthan, hold operational responsibility for habitat management within notified protected areas and conservation reserves. The procedural backbone of recovery is a conservation breeding programme: eggs are collected from the wild under permit, artificially incubated, and chicks reared in captivity at facilities such as the breeding centre at Sam, near Jaisalmer, established jointly by the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), the Rajasthan Forest Department, and the MoEFCC. The intended pathway runs from captive founder stock toward eventual reintroduction once a self-sustaining captive population is secured.

Habitat protection forms the parallel mechanism. The Desert National Park near Jaisalmer in Rajasthan is the species' principal stronghold, and additional populations occur in Kutch in Gujarat and historically in Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh. Management variants include the demarcation of "enclosure" or predator-proofed breeding zones within grasslands, regulation of grazing and agricultural conversion, and control of free-ranging dogs that prey on chicks and eggs. Because the bird lays typically a single egg per clutch on open ground, its reproductive rate is intrinsically low, making each adult mortality demographically significant and shaping the urgency of artificial incubation and headstarting approaches that raise chick survival above wild baselines.

The defining contemporary threat is collision with overhead power transmission lines crossing the Thar landscape, where rapid expansion of solar and wind infrastructure has produced a dense lattice of cables. The bird's frontally placed eyes and heavy body give it poor forward vision and limited manoeuvrability, causing fatal collisions. In April 2021 the Supreme Court of India, in M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India, directed that power lines in priority and potential bustard habitat in Rajasthan and Gujarat be laid underground where feasible and that bird diverters be installed in the interim. The order was substantially modified in March 2024, when the Court constituted an expert committee and acknowledged the practical and economic constraints on undergrounding high-voltage lines, balancing the species' survival against India's renewable energy and climate commitments.

The Great Indian Bustard is frequently conflated with adjacent grassland species, and the distinctions matter for policy. It is a distinct species from the Lesser Florican (Sypheotides indicus) and the Bengal Florican (Houbaropsis bengalensis), both smaller bustards that share grassland dependence but follow separate recovery tracks. It is likewise separate from the migratory Houbara bustard hunted in Pakistan. Unlike tiger or elephant conservation, which centres on forested protected areas, bustard conservation hinges on open grasslands — an ecosystem long misclassified administratively as "wasteland" and therefore historically targeted for afforestation, solar parks, and agricultural conversion rather than protection.

Controversy surrounds the trade-offs embedded in the 2021–2024 litigation. Renewable energy developers and the central government argued that mandatory undergrounding of high-tension lines was technically infeasible and would jeopardise India's net-zero pathway and solar capacity targets concentrated in the Thar. Conservation biologists countered that without removing the collision threat, the conservation breeding programme cannot succeed because reintroduced birds would face the same mortality. The first captive-bred chicks hatched through artificial incubation in 2019, and subsequent breeding seasons produced further chicks, yet the wild population continued to hover around or below 150 individuals, with the vast majority confined to Rajasthan. The bird's candidature as India's national bird was reportedly considered in the past but set aside, partly over the risk of misspelling its name.

For the working practitioner — whether a civil services aspirant preparing General Studies Paper III, an environmental desk officer, or a policy analyst — the Great Indian Bustard functions as a case study in reconciling biodiversity protection with the energy transition, federal division of environmental responsibility, and judicial intervention in conservation. It illustrates how a single charismatic species can crystallise tensions between Schedule I statutory protection, Supreme Court directives, and national climate policy, and how grassland ecosystems remain underserved by a protected-area framework historically built around forests. Mastery of the species requires fluency in its legal status, its principal threat from transmission infrastructure, the location of its strongholds, and the institutional actors — MoEFCC, WII, and the Rajasthan Forest Department — that drive its recovery.