Govt starts enhancing breeding of Great Indian Bustard in Rajasthan

The third member on the team was Director General of Forests and MoEFSS Special Secretary C P Goyal.

NEW DELHI: After successfully translocating eight Namibian cheetahs in Madhya Pradesh’s Kano National Park (KNP), the Centre has accelerated a process to “scale up manifold the technical and scientific” support to enhance the breeding of the “critically endangered” Great Indian Bustard (GIB), a top Ministry of Environment and Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC) said here today.

In pursuit of the ambitious GIB project, a three-member team led by MoEFCC Minister Bhupender Yadav earlier this month visited Abu Dhabi to experience first-hand the world’s largest Houbara Bustard conservation facility and to follow-up on a memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed on September 3 between India and the UAE for the latter to provide technological and scientific support to the project.

The GIB, whose scientific name is Ardeotis nigriceps, is highly endangered and its small population of 125-150 is confined mostly to parts of Rajasthan and a few in Gujarat in western India with scattered numbers in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.

Dr S P Yadav, Additional Director General of Forests (Project Tiger) and Member Secretary of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), who was part of the team that visited Abu Dhabi, said, “Two conservation facilities at Ramdevra and Samm in Jaisalmer have been set up for scaling up the breeding of the highly endangered, large bird”.

The third member on the team was Director General of Forests and MoEFSS Special Secretary C P Goyal. Yadav said that the Houbara facility’s success is measured by the fact that in the last 40 years it released nearly 630,000 bustards in the wild. These bustards live in vast plains and semi-arid regions in pebbly and sandy deserts with scattered vegetation cover, features which are also found across the GIB’s habitat in India.

The Houbara bustard was earlier considered a single species with separate populations but recent studies have shown that the birds in Asia and North Africa were distinct species. Both the Great Indian and Houbara bustards forage for plants, insects, small rodents and lizards that provide enough fluid to adapt to arid conditions.

Officials from the International Fund for Houbara Conservation will soon visit the GIB facilities at Ramdevra and Samm, besides areas in southern Indian, to study how best to share information and provide material assistance to increase the numbers and extent of the critically endangered species.