Species Recovery Programme for Great Indian Bustard

The Species Recovery Programme for the Great Indian Bustard (Ardeotis nigriceps) operates within the institutional architecture of India's Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, under which the species is listed in Schedule I, the highest category of protection. The IUCN Red List classifies the bird as Critically Endangered, and it is listed on Appendix I of the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS) and Appendix I of CITES. The recovery effort is administered as a Centrally Sponsored Scheme component of "Development of Wildlife Habitats" and the dedicated "Species Recovery Programme" managed by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), with the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) at Dehradun as the principal scientific agency and the state forest departments of Rajasthan and Gujarat as field implementers. The Great Indian Bustard is the state bird of Rajasthan, and Project Great Indian Bustard was formally launched there in 2013.

The programme proceeds along three operational pillars. The first is in-situ habitat protection, centred on the Desert National Park near Jaisalmer in Rajasthan and on managed enclosures that exclude grazing and ploughing to preserve the open grassland and scrub mosaic the bird requires. The second is conservation breeding: eggs are collected from the wild under permit, artificially incubated, and chicks are reared at dedicated centres to build a founder captive population. The third is mortality reduction, principally addressing collision with overhead power transmission lines, which the WII identified as the single largest cause of unnatural adult mortality. Each pillar feeds a long-term reintroduction objective whereby captive-bred birds, once a self-sustaining ex-situ population exists, are released to reinforce or re-establish wild populations.

The conservation breeding component crystallised in a tripartite arrangement among the MoEFCC, the Rajasthan Forest Department, and the WII. Conservation breeding centres were established at Sam and at Sorsan in Rajasthan, drawing on protocols developed with the International Fund for Houbara Conservation in Abu Dhabi, which had pioneered ex-situ rearing of the related houbara bustard. The first chicks were hatched in captivity in 2019, and the captive flock has since grown through successive collection seasons, with WII reporting the first instances of captive birds laying eggs in the late stages of the programme — a precondition for any future release. The power-line problem is addressed through two measures: installation of bird diverters (reflective flappers) on existing lines and, in the most critical habitat, the routing of high-tension lines underground.

Contemporary developments have been driven substantially through litigation. In the writ petition M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India, the Supreme Court of India in April 2021 ordered that low-voltage power lines in priority and potential bustard habitat in Rajasthan and Gujarat be laid underground and that diverters be installed pending undergrounding. The order provoked friction with India's renewable-energy ambitions, since the affected corridors host major solar and wind installations. In a significant March 2024 judgment, the Supreme Court modified its earlier blanket directive, recognising the state's climate commitments and constituting an expert committee to balance bustard conservation against the feasibility and cost of undergrounding transmission infrastructure.

The programme should be distinguished from Project Tiger and Project Elephant, which are species-specific flagship schemes with their own funding lines; bustard conservation instead sits under the broader Species Recovery Programme umbrella alongside efforts for the hangul, snow leopard, and others. It is also distinct from a Conservation Reserve or Community Reserve designation under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, though such designations are tools the programme can invoke. The bustard effort is frequently confused with the separately listed Lesser Florican (Sypheotides indicus) recovery work; the two are related bustard species sharing grassland habitat in western India but are managed under distinct action plans. Conservation breeding here is also methodologically separate from rewilding, since the founders are wild-sourced eggs rather than long-captive stock.

The central controversy concerns the trade-off between two competing public goods enshrined in policy: protection of a critically endangered endemic species and the rapid expansion of renewable energy across the Thar's high-irradiance zones. With fewer than 150 individuals estimated to survive in the wild — the overwhelming majority in the Jaisalmer landscape — the margin for error is negligible, and critics argue that diverters alone are insufficient and that undergrounding, though costly, is the only durable fix. A further edge case is the genetic bottleneck risk inherent in building a captive flock from a tiny founder base, which constrains how quickly releases can responsibly proceed. Predation, free-ranging dogs, and land-use change from agriculture and mining compound the pressure.

For the working practitioner — whether a UPSC aspirant addressing GS Paper III environment questions, a desk officer in MoEFCC, or a policy researcher on India's energy transition — the Great Indian Bustard case is a paradigmatic study in reconciling biodiversity obligations with developmental imperatives. It illustrates the operation of the Wildlife (Protection) Act's Schedule I protections, India's commitments under CMS and CITES, the judiciary's role in environmental enforcement through public interest litigation, and the limits of single-instrument solutions. The bird functions as an indicator of grassland ecosystem health, a habitat category India has historically under-protected by classifying grasslands as "wastelands." Its recovery, or failure, will signal whether India's conservation governance can manage the genuinely hard cases.