Why Indian Grasslands Turn to Scrub When Fire and Grazing Disappear

The Velavadar blackbuck sanctuary in Gujarat holds one of the last large herds of blackbuck in the world. What keeps that grassland open is not conservation fencing or replanting. It is fire and cattle. Remove both, and within a decade the short sward that blackbuck need to spot a predator at 200 metres closes into shoulder-height lantana and prosopis scrub. The animal disappears not because it was hunted but because its habitat was tidied into something it cannot use.

Indian grasslands are not degraded forest. The Deccan plateau grasslands, the terai of the Himalayan foothills, the shola grassland mosaics of the Western Ghats, and the semi-arid savannas of Rajasthan and Gujarat each carry their own plant communities, many of them endemic. Botanists have identified over 1,200 grass species in India, and the specialist grassland fauna, the great Indian bustard, the lesser florican, the wolf, the striped hyena, the Indian fox, evolved alongside open-ground conditions maintained by megafaunal grazing and seasonal fire over tens of thousands of years. These are not accidental landscapes. They are the product of a biological process as structured as a coral reef.

Grasses are built for fire in a way that woody plants are not. Their growing tissue sits below ground. A fire burns the standing biomass, removes accumulated litter that would otherwise shade out new growth, and releases nutrients locked in dead stems back into the soil. The grass regrows from the root within days. The shrub does not. Repeated burning over centuries selects for grass dominance and suppresses the encroachment of Acacia, Ziziphus, and invasive prosopis. In the Banni grasslands of the Rann of Kutch, controlled burning by the Maldhari pastoral community historically kept the landscape open. When burning was restricted after the Banni was notified as a sanctuary, prosopis, introduced in the 1960s as a supposed drought solution, expanded rapidly and now covers a large fraction of the original grassland area.

Large herbivores do something fire cannot. They selectively remove vegetation at different heights, create bare patches through trampling, and deposit dung that shifts the nutrient balance in ways that favour grasses over shrubs. Cattle, buffalo, sheep, and goats in pastoral systems have historically mimicked the function once performed by wild herds of blackbuck, chinkara, and the now-locally-extinct wild ass across much of peninsular India. The key variable is not whether grazing happens but how it is managed. Heavy continuous grazing on a single patch degrades soil structure and allows invasive annuals to establish. Rotational grazing, moving herds between seasonal pastures, which is precisely what traditional pastoral communities like the Rabari, Maldhari, and Van Gujjar practised, maintains grass cover while preventing overgrazing of any single area. When pastoral communities are excluded from protected grasslands in the name of wildlife conservation, the grazing pressure does not disappear. It becomes unmanaged on the periphery while the interior succeeds to scrub.

The succession sequence is well-documented in Indian grassland ecology. In the first two to three years after fire and grazing are excluded, grass biomass increases and the landscape looks lush. This is the phase in which exclusion is most often declared a success. By year five to seven, woody seedlings that would previously have been burned or browsed back begin establishing. By year ten, canopy cover from shrubs and small trees reduces light at ground level enough to eliminate the specialist grass species. The great Indian bustard, which requires open sightlines of several hundred metres for its display and nesting behaviour, abandons the site. The wolf, which hunts by coursing across open ground, loses its hunting terrain. The blackbuck, which relies on speed and visibility for predator detection, cannot function in closed vegetation. The scrub that replaces the grassland is not ecologically neutral. It typically supports generalist species, common mynas, jungle babblers, jackals, but loses the specialist grassland fauna entirely, and that loss is not reversed when the scrub is eventually cleared, because the seed bank of specialist grasses depletes over the same decade.

Research from the Wildlife Institute of India and from grassland ecologists working in the Deccan and the terai points consistently in the same direction: the grasslands that have retained their specialist fauna longest are those where some form of managed disturbance, burning, pastoral grazing, or both, has continued. The Rollapadu wildlife sanctuary in Andhra Pradesh, one of the last strongholds of the great Indian bustard, has maintained open grassland partly through controlled burning. Velavadar retains its blackbuck population in part because grazing by local cattle continues inside the sanctuary boundary under a managed arrangement. These are not compromises forced on conservation by political pressure. They are the mechanism by which the habitat exists at all. The pastoral communities who maintained these landscapes for generations were not degrading them. They were, in the precise ecological sense, managing them. The grassland and the pastoralist co-evolved. Separating them does not protect the grassland. It begins the process of ending it.