Qualla: Great Indian Bustard Sanctuary

Great Indian Bustard Sanctuary: Introduction

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Twenty-one birds. That was the count in the 2009 census: thirteen females and eight males, scattered across a parcel of semi-arid grassland near the city of Solapur in Maharashtra. The great Indian bustard, one of the heaviest flying birds on Earth, once ranged commonly across the dry districts of central India. By the time the sanctuary bearing its name was established in 1979, the species was already in steep decline. Today the count is lower still, and this sanctuary -- formally known as the Jawaharlal Nehru Bustard Sanctuary of Maharashtra -- represents one of the species' last footholds in a landscape being transformed around it.

Great Indian Bustard Sanctuary: The Man Who Sounded the Alarm

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The bustard's presence at Nannaj, the core area of the sanctuary, was first documented by B. S. Kulkarni in 1972. Kulkarni did more than identify the birds -- he campaigned relentlessly for their protection, writing in local newspapers to raise public awareness of a species most ...

Great Indian Bustard Sanctuary: A Landscape of Gentle Undulations

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The sanctuary sits within the Deccan thorn scrub forests ecoregion, a world of gentle undulations and isolated hillocks rising to 450-500 metres above sea level. Temperatures swing from 13 degrees Celsius in mild winters to 43 degrees in the searing summer. The topography lacks t...

Great Indian Bustard Sanctuary: When Good Intentions Go Wrong

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In a cruel irony, some of the greatest threats to the bustard came from programs designed to help the land. The Drought Prone Areas Programme, financed by the World Bank beginning in 1975, encouraged the planting of trees across the Solapur district to combat erosion and provide ...

Great Indian Bustard Sanctuary: Clearing a Path Back

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2008, after years of bureaucratic groundwork, the Forest Department began uprooting trees from 25 hectares of sanctuary land -- 15,240 trees removed from plots that had been grassland just decades earlier. The results arrived with startling speed. On August 15, 2009, an observ...