IWN Report — Friday, 21 August 2026
Glaw Lake in Arunachal Pradesh has been designated India’s 101st Ramsar site, the country’s register of wetlands of international importance, and the state’s first such recognition, according to the Press Information Bureau.
Glaw Lake sits inside the Kamlang Tiger Reserve and Wildlife Sanctuary, a freshwater lake fed by perennial mountain streams in the Eastern Himalayas. The PIB release records more than 150 tree species and 49 orchid species within the lake’s site and catchment. Union Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change Bhupender Yadav, in a post on X, pointed to the wider trend behind it, with India’s Ramsar count growing from 26 sites in 2014 to 101 now, and called the milestone part of an “unwavering commitment to environmental protection, biodiversity conservation, and sustainable development.”
Kamlang itself is not new. The Wildlife Institute of India lists it as the country’s 50th tiger reserve, notified on 6 March 2017, with a core area of 696 square kilometres and a buffer of 87 square kilometres. It borders Namdapha Tiger Reserve to the south, and the wider landscape connects across the border into Myanmar.
WII’s own reserve records list critically endangered residents including the Malayan sun bear, hoolock gibbon, white-bellied heron and capped langur, alongside top predators that include the tiger, clouded leopard, dhole and leopard cat. Glaw Lake appears in WII’s own records too, one of several wetlands inside the reserve fed by rivers including the Lai, Lati and Kamlang.
Action Plan
After the Ramsar announcement, the environment ministry had more news for the same part of the country. Earlier this month, it released India’s Clouded Leopard Conservation Action Plan, prepared with the Global Environment Facility and the UN Development Programme.
Its headline feature is a list of 14 priority conservation landscapes across Northeast India, chosen for habitat restoration and corridor work to reconnect fragmented forest. Tracking leans on camera traps, occupancy surveys, genetic sampling and environmental DNA, methods suited to a cat that is notoriously hard to see. The plan also folds the clouded leopard into the Species Recovery Programme under the government’s Integrated Development of Wildlife Habitats scheme.
Beyond monitoring, it commits to anti-poaching training for frontline staff through the M-STrIPES app, support for community livelihoods around the priority landscapes, and cooperation with neighbouring range countries on a species that does not respect borders any more than the tiger does.
The ministry’s statement does not name Kamlang among the plan’s 14 priority landscapes. But the reserve already carries the clouded leopard among its resident predators, sits inside the Northeast India forest belt the plan is built around, and had just picked up a fresh layer of wetland protection the day before the plan was made public.
Sources: Press Information Bureau (Glaw Lake Ramsar designation) · Press Information Bureau (Clouded Leopard Conservation Action Plan) · Wildlife Institute of India (Kamlang Tiger Reserve profile) · News on Air (Clouded Leopard Conservation Action Plan) · Wildlife Institute of India (Conservation Action Plan document)