India's Grassland Birds Are Disappearing Faster Than Any Other Species, And Most Indians Have Never Seen Them

Ask any Indian wildlife photographer what they shoot most and you will hear tigers, leopards, kingfishers. The grasslands barely register. Yet India's semi-arid and dry grassland belt, stretching across Rajasthan, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, and the Deccan plateau, holds a suite of bird species found nowhere else on earth in such concentration. The Floricans. The Larks. The Coursers. The Great Indian Bustard. These are not obscure subspecies clinging to a footnote. They are full species, several of them flagged as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List, disappearing at rates that outpace almost every forest bird in the country.
The reason they go unnoticed is structural. India's conservation imagination was built around forests. Project Tiger launched in 1973. Elephant reserves followed. The forest bureaucracy, the wildlife tourism economy, the camera-trap culture, all of it grew from tree cover. Grasslands were classified for decades under Indian revenue law as "wastelands," a legal category that made them available for agricultural conversion, solar energy installation, and industrial development without the same protections that forest land carries. The birds that live there never had a lobby.
The Great Indian Bustard (Ardeotis nigriceps) is one of the heaviest flying birds on the planet. Males can weigh up to 15 kilograms. They require vast, undisturbed open terrain for breeding, and they are extraordinarily sensitive to overhead power lines, a biological fact with lethal consequences. Bustards have poor frontal vision because their eyes are positioned for wide lateral scanning, a trait that evolved for detecting ground predators across open terrain. They cannot see power lines until they are nearly upon them, and collisions are a leading cause of death in the remaining population. The Wildlife Institute of India has documented this repeatedly. Fewer than 150 individuals are estimated to survive in the wild, almost all of them in the Desert National Park in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan. The Supreme Court of India, responding to a petition, ordered in 2021 that overhead power lines in bustard habitat be undergrounded, a ruling that has since been partially stayed on appeal by power companies citing renewable energy project costs. The bird's range has collapsed from 11 states to effectively one.
The Lesser Florican (Sypheotides indicus) was once common enough across central and western India that colonial-era hunting records describe shooting dozens in a single day. The species is now estimated at under 3,000 individuals, with numbers declining steeply in every survey since the 1980s. It breeds exclusively in tall grasslands during the monsoon, a habitat type that overlaps almost perfectly with agricultural land. Farmers convert these grasslands between monsoons when the birds are absent, returning to find nesting ground gone. The Bengal Florican (Houbaropsis bengalensis) is in a worse position: the Indian population, concentrated in the terai grasslands of Uttar Pradesh and Assam, is estimated at under 500 birds. Both Floricans are on the IUCN Critically Endangered list. Neither has a dedicated recovery program with the funding scale that tiger conservation commands.

A forest looks like something worth saving. A grassland, to an untrained eye, looks like empty land. This perceptual gap has policy consequences that are not abstract. The Grassland Alliance of India and researchers at the Nature Conservation Foundation have documented how grassland conversion has accelerated since the early 2000s, driven by three forces: agricultural expansion into semi-arid zones enabled by borewell irrigation, afforestation programs that plant trees on open grasslands in the name of "greening" (which destroys the open-country habitat these birds need), and solar energy farms that occupy flat, sunny, low-tree terrain, which is exactly what a grassland is. The afforestation problem is particularly counterintuitive. Government schemes that plant trees on revenue wastelands are counted as environmental wins. For the Great Indian Bustard, a Bengal Florican, or a Sykes's Lark, a planted tree line is a predator perch and a territory destroyer. Conservation here requires keeping land open, which looks like doing nothing.
The Wildlife Institute of India and BirdLife International have both identified the minimum requirements: legal reclassification of key grasslands as Protected Areas, mandatory underground cabling in bustard and florican zones, a moratorium on afforestation in open grassland ecosystems, and a captive breeding program for the Great Indian Bustard that is adequately funded. A captive breeding effort exists, the Chhatbir Zoo in Punjab and the Sam facility in Jaisalmer have produced some eggs, but the program remains critically under-resourced relative to the scale of the decline. The Supreme Court's 2021 direction was a signal that the legal tools exist. The gap is between legal direction and on-ground implementation, a gap that has swallowed several Indian conservation mandates before this one.

The Great Indian Bustard and the Floricans did not decline because India lacks conservation law. They declined because the land they need does not look, to most eyes, like something worth protecting, and because the renewable energy transition, which is genuinely necessary, is being built on the last patches of terrain where these birds can survive. Both things are true at once, and any honest conservation response has to hold that tension rather than resolve it cheaply in either direction.