Power Lines Are Killing India's Great Indian Bustard. Here's What the Supreme Court Ordered

The Great Indian Bustard, Ardeotis nigriceps, carries up to 15 kilograms on a frame built for open grassland, not evasive flight. Its eyes sit on the sides of its head, giving it a wide field of vision for ground-level predators but almost no forward binocular vision. A power line strung at 30 to 50 metres does not register as a threat until the bird is already inside it. Collision, not electrocution, is the primary cause of death. The impact is usually fatal.

Fewer than 150 individuals survive in the wild, almost all of them in Rajasthan's Thar Desert and the grasslands of Gujarat's Kutch district. The species once ranged across 11 Indian states. Habitat loss, hunting, and agricultural conversion reduced that range over the 20th century. Power infrastructure finished what those pressures started in the remaining strongholds.

Wildlife First and other conservation organisations brought a petition before the Supreme Court arguing that the government's own Project Great Indian Bustard, launched in 2015, was being undermined by the continued expansion of renewable energy infrastructure across the bird's critical habitat. The Thar Desert, where the bustard's last viable population lives, is also where India has concentrated some of its largest solar and wind energy projects.

In April 2021, a bench of the Supreme Court directed that overhead power lines within the Priority 1 areas identified for bustard conservation be put underground. The order covered roughly 80,000 square kilometres across Rajasthan and Gujarat. The Ministry of Power and renewable energy developers pushed back, arguing that undergrounding high-voltage lines at that scale was technically difficult and prohibitively expensive, with estimates running into tens of thousands of crores of rupees.

In 2024, the court modified its original order. Rather than mandating undergrounding across the entire priority zone, it directed a committee of experts to assess which sections of line were most dangerous to the bird and to prioritise those. The modification acknowledged the infrastructure reality without abandoning the conservation obligation. The legal question, whether a critically endangered species can impose binding constraints on national energy infrastructure, remains unresolved in its full form, but the court's willingness to entertain it set a precedent.

High-voltage direct current lines, the kind that carry power from Rajasthan's solar parks to the national grid, cannot simply be buried the way a household cable is. The insulation requirements, heat dissipation demands, and maintenance access needs for lines operating at 400 kilovolts and above make undergrounding technically complex. Jointing sections underground introduces failure points that are far harder to locate and repair than an overhead fault visible from the air.

Lower-voltage distribution lines, the 11-kilovolt and 33-kilovolt lines that cross the last few kilometres to villages and substations, are more tractable. These are the lines that cut through the core bustard nesting and foraging areas. The expert committee approach the Supreme Court settled on in 2024 is designed to separate these manageable sections from the genuinely difficult transmission infrastructure and address the former first.

Bird flight diverters, spiral or rectangular markers clipped to existing lines to make them more visible, have been deployed in some sections. Studies on their effectiveness for bustards specifically are limited, because the population is too small to generate statistically useful collision data. What is known from studies on the Great Bustard, Otis tarda, in Europe is that diverters reduce collision rates significantly for that species. Extrapolating to Ardeotis nigriceps is reasonable but not confirmed.

The power line question absorbed most of the legal and media attention, but conservationists working in Jaisalmer and Barmer districts have consistently pointed to a second constraint: the Desert National Park and its surrounding areas have seen a steady increase in human disturbance as tourism, military activity, and agricultural encroachment have grown. Bustards require large, undisturbed grassland patches for breeding. A male's display territory alone can cover several square kilometres.

The Species Recovery Plan under Project Great Indian Bustard includes a captive breeding programme run by the Wildlife Institute of India in collaboration with international partners. As of the mid-2020s, the programme had produced chicks in captivity, a meaningful technical achievement for a species that is notoriously difficult to breed outside its habitat. Reintroduction into the wild depends on having safe habitat to release birds into. Underground cables and captive breeding are not alternative strategies. They are sequential ones.

The Supreme Court order matters because it established that infrastructure planning in India must account for species-level extinction risk, not just environmental impact in the general sense. Whether the modified 2024 direction produces enough undergrounding fast enough to change the trajectory for a bird with fewer than 150 individuals left is a question the next decade will answer.