IWN Series: Antlers & Antelopes of India — Part 4
Across an open plain in Barnawapara Wildlife Sanctuary, Chhattisgarh, a blackbuck is running. This, in itself, is not remarkable. A blackbuck in full flight — head back, legs barely seeming to touch the ground — is one of the great sights of the Indian grassland. Clocked at up to 80 kilometres an hour, it is the fastest land animal in India, and one of the fastest in the world.
What is remarkable is that this particular animal is running through a landscape that had not seen its kind in half a century.
The blackbuck was declared locally extinct in Chhattisgarh in 2017. In 2026, it is back. And on 26 April, it was celebrated in a national address as a symbol of what India’s conservation machinery can achieve when it sets its mind to a problem.
The animal itself
The blackbuck (Antilope cervicapra) is the only living member of the genus Antilope — sole heir to the word that German naturalist Pallas, in the 18th century, extended to an entire family of hoofed ruminants. In a sense, the blackbuck is the original antelope. The word was coined for it first.
It is a diurnal animal, active through the day across open grasslands, scrub plains, and semi-arid terrain — precisely the kind of landscape that India has been losing fastest to agriculture, afforestation, and urban expansion. The male is among the more striking animals in India’s wild: a deep black-brown on the back and flanks, white on the underside, with spiralling horns that can reach 70 centimetres in length and carry a distinctive V-shaped twist. Females and juveniles are a pale fawn, hornless, and considerably harder to spot at a distance.
The blackbuck is the State Animal of three Indian states — Punjab, Haryana, and Andhra Pradesh. In Hindu tradition, its skin and horns are considered sacred. In Buddhist iconography, it symbolises good fortune. It grazes across the same open plains where, in a different time, Mughal emperors hunted it from horseback with trained cheetahs — an image that says more than it intends to about the relationship between the blackbuck and the Asiatic cheetah, now absent from these grasslands for over seventy years.
Where it stands
The IUCN lists the blackbuck as Least Concern globally, which is somewhat misleading when read at the Indian scale. The global assessment, last updated in 2016, estimated around 35,000 mature individuals. Within India, a more recent study in Rajasthan — one of the species’ strongest remaining strongholds — found that the mean population across surveyed districts had fallen from around 1,434 in 2016 to around 978 by 2023. Only Churu district showed any growth. Fragmented, isolated, and increasingly hemmed in by agriculture and invasive plantations, blackbuck populations across the country are under quiet pressure even as the headline number looks reassuring.
The deeper problem is the habitat. India’s savanna grasslands — the blackbuck’s ecological home — are among the country’s most threatened ecosystems, and among the least protected. Only around five percent of India’s open natural ecosystems, including savanna-grassland, are formally protected. The rest are routinely classified as wasteland and converted, planted over with eucalyptus or Prosopis juliflora under social forestry schemes that, in attempting to increase tree cover, inadvertently destroy the open habitats that species like the blackbuck depend on. A forest department that plants trees in a blackbuck’s grassland is, in ecological terms, removing its home.
The Bishnoi: conservation as faith
No account of the blackbuck is complete without the Bishnoi.
The Bishnoi are a community of the Thar Desert, spread across Rajasthan, Haryana, Punjab, and parts of Madhya Pradesh, who have lived by a set of 29 principles — bish (twenty) plus noi (nine) — laid down by their founder Guru Jambheshwarji in the 15th century. Eight of those principles concern compassion for living beings and the protection of biodiversity. The blackbuck and the chinkara are sacred to them. So is the khejri tree. Bishnoi villages in Rajasthan have functioned, for centuries, as informal wildlife sanctuaries — places where the blackbuck wanders into the fields and is left entirely undisturbed.
The depth of that commitment has been tested. Bishnoi individuals have lost their lives defending blackbucks from hunters. In 1977, a man named Birbala Ram Khichar died protecting a gazelle; he was later honoured with a Shaurya Chakra. In 1996, Nihalchand Dharniya of Churu was killed defending a blackbuck, and received the same honour posthumously. In September 1998, the Bishnoi community filed an FIR that eventually led to the conviction of a Bollywood actor for poaching blackbucks near Jodhpur — a case that wound through courts for nearly two decades and concluded with a custodial sentence.
The irony is that the landscapes where the Bishnoi have historically kept the blackbuck alive are themselves now under pressure. A 2025 study of the Abohar Wildlife Sanctuary in Punjab — where the blackbuck was designated the flagship species on privately owned, Bishnoi-farmed land — found that agricultural expansion, fenced croplands, and feral dog predation have fragmented and diminished the population even within the sanctuary boundaries. The faith endures; the habitat is not keeping pace.
The Chhattisgarh return
Barnawapara Wildlife Sanctuary in Mahasamund district had not seen a blackbuck since around 1927 — nearly a century of absence. The species disappeared from Chhattisgarh through hunting and habitat loss long before modern conservation frameworks existed to prevent it.
In 2018, the Chhattisgarh Forest Department resolved to change that. A precisely planned five-year revival programme ran from 2021 to 2026. Seventy-seven blackbucks were translocated from two sources: fifty from the National Zoological Park in New Delhi, and twenty-seven from the Kanan Pendari Zoological Garden in Bilaspur. The animals were housed in acclimatisation enclosures for up to two years before being gradually released, allowing them to adjust to local terrain, climate, and predator pressures before facing the open landscape.
The early years were difficult. But the sanctuary’s blackbuck population began to establish itself. By 2026, around 130 individuals were recorded roaming freely in the wild, with additional animals still in managed enclosures awaiting release. The Chhattisgarh Forest Department is now planning to replicate the model at Gomardha Wildlife Sanctuary, which has comparable grassland and topography. The blackbuck’s grazing behaviour also serves the ecosystem directly — it regulates vegetation, suppresses invasive plant growth, and restores the functional balance of the open meadow habitats it once dominated.
The story caught national attention on 26 April, when it was cited as evidence of India’s conservation progress. But the more important story is the one behind the headline: a five-year programme of scientific translocation, patient acclimatisation, sustained monitoring, and habitat restoration that produced a functioning, self-sustaining population in a landscape where the species had been ecologically absent for a hundred years.
The grassland question
The blackbuck’s return to Chhattisgarh is a conservation success. It is also a reminder that reintroduction alone is not a long-term strategy. The reason India needs reintroduction programmes for the blackbuck — an animal that was, within living memory, one of the most widespread species on the subcontinent — is that its habitat has been systematically reclassified, converted, and planted over. Restoring the animal without securing the ecosystem it requires is, at best, a holding operation.
India’s open natural ecosystems — grasslands, scrub savannas, the dry plains that once stretched across the Deccan and the Indo-Gangetic belt — are overdue for the same level of formal protection given to forests. The blackbuck is their flagship. Its presence in Chhattisgarh’s Barnawapara is a beginning. Whether it is a lasting one depends on decisions about land classification and habitat management that go well beyond the sanctuary fence.
Next in the series: Part 5 — The Chital, India’s most numerous deer, and the animal that holds the food chain together.
Sources: IUCN Red List — Blackbuck · Chhattisgarh Forest Department / IANS, April 2026 · The Better India — Barnawapara · ScienceDirect — Blackbuck Rajasthan population study, 2025 · Integrative Conservation — Bishnoi and Abohar, 2025 · Wildlife Institute of India