The Great Indian Bustard Is Disappearing. Here Is What It Actually Needs
The Great Indian Bustard weighs up to 15 kilograms, stands nearly a metre tall, and cannot see power lines until it is already flying into them. That single biological fact, a visual field oriented downward for scanning prey, not forward for scanning obstacles, explains more about why this bird is dying than any other single factor. There are fewer than 150 left in the wild, almost all in Rajasthan's Thar desert and the Kutch grasslands of Gujarat, and the number has been falling for decades without a clean reversal in sight.
Why the Grassland Itself Is the Problem Nobody Sees
The Bustard lives in open, semi-arid grassland, the kind of landscape that most land-use policy has historically treated as degraded, unproductive, or available. India's grasslands have no equivalent of the Forest Rights Act. They have no protected status by default. When a solar developer or a state government looks at a flat, treeless expanse in Jaisalmer district, the legal and administrative framework offers almost no friction. The land can be allocated. The Bustard has no lobby. Farmers, infrastructure planners, and renewable energy developers all have legitimate claims on the same terrain, and the bird's requirement, large, undisturbed, unfenced grassland, is precisely what each of those uses removes.
The Power Line Problem That a Supreme Court Order Could Not Fully Solve
In April 2021, the Supreme Court of India ordered that overhead power lines in the core and potential Bustard habitat in Rajasthan and Gujarat be undergrounded. The order was significant. It was also immediately contested by power transmission companies and renewable energy developers on grounds of cost and technical feasibility, particularly for high-voltage lines. The court later modified the order to allow a committee to assess which lines could realistically be undergrounded and which could not. The result is that the most dangerous lines, the high-voltage transmission corridors running through prime habitat, remain overhead while the process continues. Bustards keep flying into them. The Wildlife Institute of India estimated that power line collisions could alone drive the species to extinction within decades if the lines stay where they are.
What the Bird Needs During Nesting That Almost Nothing Provides
The Great Indian Bustard lays a single egg on the ground. One egg, one chick, one breeding attempt per year under normal conditions. The female incubates alone for about 27 days and raises the chick without a nest structure of any kind, just open ground with enough grass cover to conceal the egg from predators. Any human disturbance during this period, whether from vehicles, livestock, construction noise, or low-flying drones, can cause the female to abandon the nest. Feral dogs, which have expanded across rural Rajasthan in large numbers, are a direct predator of eggs and chicks. The species has no capacity to compensate for lost breeding attempts the way a sparrow or a pigeon can. One failed season is one fewer bird.
The Captive Breeding Programme and What It Can and Cannot Do
The Wildlife Institute of India, in partnership with the Rajasthan Forest Department, runs a captive breeding facility at Sam, near Jaisalmer. Eggs are collected from the wild, incubated under controlled conditions, and chicks are raised with the intention of eventual release. The programme has produced chicks. It has also demonstrated how difficult it is to rear a bird this specialised in captivity, the Bustard is prone to stress, sensitive to diet, and does not breed readily outside its natural environment. Captive breeding buys time. It does not substitute for habitat. A bird raised in an enclosure and released into a landscape still threaded with overhead power lines and fragmented by solar fencing faces the same threats that reduced the wild population in the first place. The programme's own scientists have said as much publicly.
The Conflict That Has No Easy Resolution
Rajasthan is one of India's most important states for solar energy. The Thar desert receives some of the highest solar irradiance in the country, and the national renewable energy targets require that land. The Bustard's last stronghold and India's solar ambition occupy the same geography. This is not a problem of bad intent on either side. It is a structural collision between two legitimate national priorities, and the bird is losing because it has no economic value that the planning process can weigh against a gigawatt of generation capacity. What the Bustard needs, large, connected, unfenced grassland with underground power transmission and minimal human presence during breeding season, is a package that costs money, foregoes revenue, and requires sustained political will across multiple state and central government departments simultaneously. That combination has not yet materialised for long enough to change the trajectory.