Great Indian Bustard

Great Indian Bustard

Subject : Environment

Section : Species in news

Concept :

• A Supreme Court­ appointed committee has recommended that to protect the endangered great Indian bustard, close to 800 km of proposed power lines in the Thar and Kutch deserts of Rajasthan and Gujarat should be re­routed or made to go underground.
• This makes up about 10% of the length of the lines. However, no significant steps appear to have been taken by power companies and State governments to comply with them.
• The 7,200 km of over_headlines are meant to transfer solar power into the grid, but existing lines have been harming the birds, which have been dying in collision with the lines or from electrocution.
• Only some 150 of these birds are still left, most of them in Jaisalmer of Rajasthan.

Great Indian Bustard

• One of the heaviest flying birds endemic to the Indian subcontinent.
• State Bird of Rajasthan.

Habitat:

• Untamed, Arid grasslands.
• Among the heaviest birds with flight, GIBs prefer grasslands as their habitats
• A Maximum number of GIBs were found in Jaisalmer and the Indian Army-controlled field firing range near Pokhran, Rajasthan.
• Other areas: Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.

Population:

• As per the studies conducted by the Wildlife Institute of India, there are around 150 Great Indian Bustards left across the country which includes about 128 birds in Rajasthan and less than 10 birds each in the States of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.
• While the GIBs’ historic range included much of the Indian sub-continent, it has now shrunk to just 10 per cent of that.

Protection Status:

• IUCN Status: Critically Endangered.
• Listed in Wildlife Protection Act’s Schedule 1.
• Significance of GIBs in the ecosystem-
• Terrestrial birds spend most of their time on the ground, feeding on insects, lizards, grass seeds, etc. GIBs are considered the flagship bird species of grassland and hence barometers of the health of grassland ecosystems.

Why is the Great Indian Bustard endangered?

• Among the biggest threats to the GIBs are overhead power transmission lines.
• Due to their poor frontal vision, the birds can’t spot the power lines from a distance, and are too heavy to change course when close. Thus, they collide with the cables and die.
• According to the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), in Rajasthan, 18 GIBs die every year after colliding with overhead power lines.

Great Indian Bustard: Conservation efforts

• The Supreme Court in April 2021 ordered that all overhead power transmission lines in core and potential GIB habitats in Rajasthan and Gujarat should be made underground.
• Supreme court has suggested the installation of bird diverters (reflector-like structures strung on power cables) in priority areas.
• It also asked them to assess the total length of transmission lines that need to go underground in the two states.
• In 2015, the Centre launched the GIB species recovery programme. Under this, the WII and Rajasthan forest department jointly set up breeding centres where GIB eggs harvested from the wild were incubated artificially.