IWN Original Report — Tuesday, 5 May 2026
There is a word in India’s land revenue records that is doing more damage to the country’s wildlife than almost any poacher, any highway, or any mine. The word is wasteland.
It does not mean what you think it means.
In the language of India’s colonial-era land classification system — a system still governing tens of millions of hectares today — wasteland does not mean barren. It does not mean unproductive. It means, with bureaucratic precision, land that carries no trees. Open land. Grassland. Scrub savanna. The vast, sun-struck plains of the Deccan, the Thar, the Terai margins, the Vidarbha plateau.
By this definition, a thriving blackbuck grassland in Rajasthan is wasteland. The Kutch semi-arid plains where the last Great Indian Bustards in Gujarat are hanging on: wasteland. The open savannas that the cheetah — newly returned to India after seventy years of absence — needs to hunt and range across: wasteland. Available for diversion. Eligible for improvement. Waiting to be made productive.
Where the word comes from
The classification has a surprisingly direct intellectual origin. As wildlife biologist MD Madhusudan has noted, the concept derives from the English philosopher John Locke, who argued in the seventeenth century that any land not in economic production — idle, undisciplined, unenclosed — was waste. The British colonial administration adopted this framework wholesale when it arrived in India, designing revenue systems that recognised only land generating taxable income from timber, grain, or cash crops. Open landscapes that supported nomadic herders, migratory birds, and grassland predators generated no such income, and were accordingly recorded as waste.
That was the eighteenth century. The classification remains in force in the twenty-first.
India’s government published its first Wasteland Atlas in 2000, produced by the Indian Space Research Organisation for the Ministry of Rural Development. The atlas is now in its fifth edition. Its foreword states plainly that its purpose is to enable “devising strategies to bring back such wastelands into the productive folds once again.” In 2019, nearly 17 per cent of India’s total land area — an area larger than France — was categorised as wasteland. A study by ecologists Abi Tamim Vanak and MD Madhusudan found that nearly 70 per cent of India’s open natural ecosystems overlap with areas the government classifies as wastelands. Of those, less than five per cent are covered under the existing protected area network.
The result is a conservation system that is structurally blind to the habitats it most needs to protect.
Three species, one root cause
Consider the Great Indian Bustard. Once found across eleven states, this large, slow-breeding bird of open grasslands is now critically endangered. From an estimated 1,260 birds in 1969, fewer than 130 remain today, with over 90 per cent of them in Rajasthan. The proximate causes are overhead power lines — the GIB has poor frontal vision and flies into them — and habitat loss driven by solar and wind energy expansion into the Thar. But beneath both lies the same structural reality: the grasslands these birds require are classified as wasteland, making them legally straightforward to divert for renewable energy projects. In Gujarat’s Kutch district, the Naliya Grassland — a designated Important Bird and Biodiversity Area — now appears to hold only four females and no males. In May 2025, a Supreme Court-appointed committee submitted its conservation plan for the species. The fundamental question that plan cannot yet answer: is there enough secured, legally protected grassland habitat left to release captive-bred birds into? As of now, wildlife biologist Sumit Dookia has said plainly, the answer is no.
Then there is the blackbuck. India’s fastest land animal, the blackbuck once ranged in vast herds across the open plains of the subcontinent. It is not currently endangered — unlike the GIB, it has a reasonably stable population — but the reason it survives at all in some landscapes is not a functioning habitat policy. It is the Bishnoi community of Rajasthan, who have protected the blackbuck on religious grounds for five centuries, absorbing the costs of coexistence that the land revenue system never internalised. Elsewhere, blackbuck populations have fragmented and disappeared as their grassland habitat has been converted to agriculture and solar parks — all legally, all on land the records call waste.
And then there is the cheetah. Project Cheetah has divided conservationists since before the first Namibian animal touched down at Kuno in September 2022. The debate is genuine and unresolved: critics, including a group of international conservation scientists who published a letter in Nature Ecology & Evolution, have argued that the project overestimated Kuno’s carrying capacity, that African cheetahs were brought into a landscape with human population pressures far beyond anything in their source countries, and that early mortality rates — well above comparable reintroductions in South Africa — reveal ecological mismatches the project’s planners did not adequately anticipate. Proponents, including the NTCA, point to successful wild births, a growing second generation of India-born cubs, and a case for adaptive learning that is still being written.
The debate is worth having. But the cheetah is here now — cubs are being born at Kuno, expansion to Gandhi Sagar and Nauradehi is underway, and India has staked its conservation credibility on making the programme work. And that means, whatever one’s view of the project’s origins, the grassland question can no longer be deferred. Cheetahs need open terrain: savannas and grasslands where they can spot prey and reach top speed across 100 square kilometres or more of ranging ground. The target is a self-sustaining metapopulation of 60–70 animals across 17,000 square kilometres by 2032. But as Kuno fills to capacity and expansion to Nauradehi is planned, wildlife expert Ravi Chellam has described Nauradehi as “predominantly woodland, not open grassland” — a sub-optimal environment for a species that evolved for open savanna. The ideal habitat for cheetahs — legally secured, open grassland, protected from diversion — is precisely the category that India’s land classification system has spent 200 years treating as available for other uses.
What the ecologists are saying
The scientific community has been consistent on this for years. Grasslands sequester 146 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year — almost as much as tropical forests — and support 500 million livestock and 50 per cent of India’s fodder production, as well as over 20 nomadic tribes. The Wasteland Atlas, these researchers argue, should be scrapped entirely and replaced with a comprehensive Indian Habitat Classification System built on ecological science rather than colonial revenue logic. Several have pointed out the absurdity embedded in the current system: wildlife sanctuaries and national parks notified under the Wildlife Protection Act — including the Kutch Wild Ass Sanctuary, Hemis National Park, and Rollapadu Blackbuck Sanctuary — are all labelled wastelands in the government’s own records.
The Forest Conservation Act has protected India’s tree cover with genuine rigour — India’s forest bureaucracy is among the world’s most developed. But the open ecosystem has no equivalent. There is no Grassland Conservation Act. No Savanna Ministry. No department whose institutional mandate is the protection of land that, by official classification, should not exist as wildlife habitat.
What it would take
The fix is not technically complicated. Ecologists have called for the wasteland classification to be overhauled, grasslands to be formally recognised as ecologically sensitive ecosystems, and open natural ecosystems to be mapped and brought within a legal protection framework comparable to what forests enjoy. Researchers have proposed a comprehensive Indian Habitat Classification System — dynamic enough to capture seasonal and long-term changes, and cohesive enough to show overlaps between grassland, wetland, and forest maps that currently exist in silos.
The political complication is that India’s renewable energy targets — net zero by 2070, 500 GW of non-fossil fuel capacity by 2030 — have created powerful incentives to direct solar and wind development towards land that is legally cheap and easy to acquire. Wasteland. The GIB’s home. The blackbuck’s range. The cheetah’s savanna.
India has pulled tigers back from the edge. It has brought the one-horned rhinoceros back from near-extinction at Kaziranga. It is attempting, with genuine ambition, to restore the cheetah. All three are forest or wetland species, or species that fit within the conservation categories the system already protects.
The open grassland has no such champion in the legal architecture of the Indian state. The Great Indian Bustard, the blackbuck, and the cheetah are all, in their different ways, paying the price for that absence.
The bureaucrat’s stamp has been coming down for two hundred years. It says: wasteland. It is still coming down today.
Sources: Scroll.in · Mongabay India · Scientific American · Roundglass Sustain · Roundglass Sustain — GIB, Kutch · Current Conservation · Sanctuary Nature Foundation · Climate Tracker Asia · Indian Masterminds · The Print · Outlook