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Ecology & Environment
Mahesh

04/07/24 10:47 AM IST

Critically endangered Great Indian Bustards’ recovery program

In News
  • Recently,  Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA) approved Rs 56 crore funding for the next phase of the conservation program of the Great Indian Bustard (GIB) and the Lesser Florican for the 2024-2029 period.
GIB recovery plan
  • The Great Indian Bustard is a large bird found only in India.
  • It is known to be a key indicator species of the grassland habitat, which means its survival also signals the health of grassland habitats.
  • Over the past four decades, its population has declined steadily from being in the range of 700 individuals to less than 150 as of today.
  • Loss of their habitat to rising farmlands in semi-arid regions of Rajasthan, depredation of eggs by other predators such as dogs, monitor lizards and humans and more recently, death due to overhead power lines have caused their numbers to decline.
  • In fact, the threat from power lines was the subject matter of a recent plea before the Supreme Court which resulted in an important order.
  • The Supreme Court, while agreeing with the government’s contention that overhead power lines could not be entirely eliminated from the bustard’s habitats, had constituted an expert committee to determine the “scope, feasibility and extent” of overhead and underground electric lines in the area.
  • The poor frontal vision of the GIB’s and their inability to swerve away from overhead power lines in their flying path, owing to their large size, are two key factors leading to their collision with transmission lines.
  • A 2020 WII study estimated that 18 GIB’s die annually due to collision with overhead high-tension power lines in the Thar landscape.
  • The Compensatory Afforestation Fund, which consists of money collected for afforestation in lieu of diversion of forests for non-forest uses, funded this project.
  • Later, in July 2018, a tripartite agreement was signed between the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Rajasthan Forest Department and Wildlife Institute of India (WII).
Achievements by conservation programs
  • Before the development of the CBC in Ramdevra, work on the conservation breeding in June 2019 at the temporary facility in Sam, Jaisalmer. conservation breeding began by collecting eggs from the wild.
  • The eggs are incubated artificially at the centres and hand-reared in the breeding centre itself. Later, chicks that attained adulthood at the centre have mated and given birth to the next generation.
  • The breeding centres now have a founder population of 40 GIBs, of which 29 were those whose eggs were collected from the wild. The remaining 11 were born to those who were mated at the centre.
  • The scientific reasoning behind creating a founder population is to have a minimum viable population to prevent the probability of extirpation of the captive population and to capture the genetic variability of the source population.
  • A minimum of 20 adult birds including 15 females is needed to establish a minimum viable population in captivity, as per the 2018 tripartite agreement.
Way forward
  • While the total length of the next phase of the GIB and Lesser Florican conservation is 2024-2033, the immediate next phase will run till 2029.
  • The target of the project would be to complete the upgradation of the CBC at Ramdevra and development of the Lesser Florican CBC at Sorsan, both in Rajasthan.
  • The Ramdevra facility would also include a new lab for artificial insemination, which the WII plans to use from 2026 onwards.
  • Conducting population surveys in Jaisalmer, other parts of Rajasthan and the range states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh will be done in the next two years.
  • The most important target in the next five years would be releasing the captive-bred GIBs in the wild.
  • The actual release in the wild would be preceded by soft release in enclosures in Rajasthan. 
Source- Indian Express

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