‘Great Indian Bustard is close to extinction’

The only species names after India, the Great Indian Bustard (GIB), and one of the world’s heaviest flying birds is close to extinction, global wildlife watchdog International Union for Conservation and Nature (IUCN) has said.

Updated on: Jun 9, 2011, 02:22:14 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The only species named after India, the Great Indian Bustard (GIB), and one of the world’s heaviest flying birds is close to extinction,

global wildlife watchdog International Union for Conservation and Nature (IUCN) has said.

Their number has fallen to less than 250 from about 1,000 in 2008 and over 20,000 to 40,000 after India’s independence. Therefore, the IUCN has upgraded the bird, weighing around 15 kg, found in India and Pakistan, from endangered to critically endangered, meaning that if corrective steps are not taken the bird will vanish.

Asad Rahmani, director of Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), said there was an urgent need to start Project Bustard on long term basis.

The environment ministry has a programme for endangered species such as GIB but not on the scale of the ones for tigers and elephants. Rahmani said breeding of Australian and Kiro Bustards have been successful and India should a breeding programme on similar lines.

The job many not be easy as a study by experts in 2011 of the DNA in 63 samples from 5 states found very low genetic diversity suggesting a historical population reduction and said attempts to breed them in captivity have failed.

In the last two decades, green habitats of the Great Indian Bustard have been converted into agricultural lands or degraded by excessive cattle grazing. The grassland in Madhya Pradesh has got submerged in Indira Sarovar Dam and in Rajasthan lost to excessive grazing. There have also been some incidents of poaching.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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