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Efforts to conserve wetlands show steady progress across states: Govt
Wetland conservation efforts show progress, with 77% mapped and 40% boundaries demarcated. States urged to expedite completion as court monitors.
The ongoing efforts to conserve wetlands across the country has shown steady progress with figures provided by the Centre to the Supreme Court on Tuesday indicating that about 77% of 231195 wetlands have been mapped so far by states and union territories based on ground truthing while the exercise of demarcating their boundaries is yet to reach the halfway mark.
The figures were presented to the court pursuant to an order of the top court on December 11, 2024 setting a deadline of three months for demarcation of the total wetlands based on satellite data received from Space Application Centre (SAC)-ISRO.
While the three month period expired in March, the Centre has since been following up with the states and UTs to speed up the exercise. As per the Wetland (Conservation and Management) Rules, 2010 (later amended in 2017), the duty lies on states to identify and notify wetlands within their jurisdictions and to preserve it from possible misuse.
The data presented by the Wetlands Division under the ministry of environment, forests and climate change (MoEFCC) states that as on July 21, 2025, there has been a further increase in the number of wetlands that have been ground-truthed and whose boundaries have been demarcated.
“At present, out of the 231195 wetlands inventoried in the SAC Atlas 2021, ground-truthing of 178374 wetlands (77%) has been completed, and boundaries of 92,127 wetlands (40%) have been demarcated,” the brief note submitted by the ministry said.
This shows a slight improvement from the figures the Centre presented in March when the ground-truthing status was shown as 69% while boundaries of only 32% of the over two lakh wetlands were demarcated.
It also gave a list of 91 Ramsar sites in the country. The Ramsar sites are wetlands of international importance under Ramsar Convention on Wetlands.
As the data received by the Centre is satellite based, the court had pushed states and UTs to carry out the first step for identifying these wetlands through ground-truthing. The wetlands serve as rich biodiversity reserves that act as buffer during droughts, help recharge groundwater among other purposes.
The Centre said, “Reminders have been issued to the states/UTs, urging them to expedite the process of ground-truthing and boundary demarcation of wetlands and to upload the relevant information on the Save Wetlands Campaign portal.”
A bench of justices Sudhanshu Dhulia and Aravind Kumar took the note of the Centre on record and posted the matter for hearing on August 19 as the court was about to rise for the day.
In March, when the court last heard the matter, states had given varying deadlines for completing the exercise of ground-truthing. While most states claimed that the exercise will be completed before October this year, Assam requested for time till October 2026 to complete the task.
The court order covers wetlands that are more than 2.25 hectares. By an order passed in February 2017, the top court had protected 201503 wetlands and has since been monitoring efforts for conservation and management of wetlands.
The orders were passed in a bunch of public interest litigations (PIL) filed by Anand Arya, a Greater Noida based birder and environmentalist, advocate MK Balakrishnan and NGO Vanashakti.
According to the petitioners, there are around 555,557 wetlands which are less than 2.25 ha in area as identified in the National Wetland Inventory & Assessment-SAC 2011, that also require to be notified and protected.
In November last year, the MoEFCC had apprised the top court that out of the 231,195 wetlands in the country, only 92 have been notified to be protected under Wetlands Rules 2017. As on date, there are 102 notified wetlands, with almost 75 in Rajasthan, 25 in Goa, and one each in Uttar Pradesh (Ramgarh taal) and Chandigarh (Sukhna lake).
From time to time, the Centre has been asking states and UTs to provide status on wetlands. The affidavit of Centre filed last year said that due to ground-truthing exercise, the number of wetlands has increased by 18,810 (8.86%) and the area by 0.64 million ha between 2006-07 and 2017-18.
As per the latest data, ground-truthing is 100% complete in Chandigarh, while in states of Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Mizoram, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and Tripura, it has crossed 90%.
