IWN Report — Tuesday, 6 October 2026
The Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) says 35 wetlands across 10 districts of eastern Uttar Pradesh were legally notified in April 2026, putting 1,243.8 hectares under statutory protection in a region where the local lakes and marshes are habitat for the Sarus crane, according to an account WTI published on 5 October.
WTI assisted the Uttar Pradesh State Wetland Authority (UPSWA) in getting the notification through, and a further 13,888.5 hectares around the wetlands were designated as a Zone of Influence. The districts covered are Bahraich, Balrampur, Barabanki, Ayodhya, Kushinagar, Maharajganj, Sant Kabir Nagar, Shravasti, Shahjahanpur and Siddharth Nagar.
The groundwork goes back to 2019, when UPSWA asked WTI to survey and document 49 wetlands in the region. According to WTI, its teams recorded each wetland’s physical features, the ways local people use it and the threats it faces, then prepared short briefs and maps showing how water spreads across each site and where its contours run. District Wetland Management Committees reviewed and recommended that documentation before UPSWA ratified it.
WTI says notification under the Wetlands (Conservation and Management) Rules, 2017 protects these sites against encroachment, conversion, waste dumping and the discharge of untreated effluent. The sites are known locally as taals and jhabars.
Local Use
The same wetlands serve nearby communities as fishing grounds, grazing land and sources of water, and WTI says the notification framework leaves room for traditional uses under a principle of “wise use”, among them grazing, aquaculture or wetland-compatible agriculture, and the harvesting of wetland resources.
Tata Trusts and World Land Trust provided the financial support that carried the multi-year fieldwork and documentation, WTI said.