Rajasthan's Thar Holds About 130 Great Indian Bustards, 97 More Live in Two Breeding Centres, and Two Captive-Bred Males Were Released on 4 October 2026

The latest official count of Great Indian Bustards in Rajasthan’s Thar Desert is 130 birds, with a standard error of 21. The Wildlife Institute of India (WII) took it from vehicle surveys in October 2024 and April 2025 over about 14,000 sq km around Jaisalmer, and its report says the number is broadly stable against the 128 (standard error 19) it recorded in 2017 to 2018.

On 4 October 2026 two captive-bred males were released at Sam, inside Desert National Park, under a programme run by the environment ministry, the Rajasthan forest department and WII. PTI reported that day that the two breeding centres, at Sam and Ramdevra, hold 97 birds.

What the 130 covers and what it leaves out

The survey report, published in 2026 under the names of the ministry, WII and the Rajasthan Forest Department, describes a bird that is Critically Endangered on the IUCN list and is Rajasthan’s state bird. Teams drove 419 transects totalling 4,522 km through 144 sq km grid cells. They saw 35 groups of bustards, 60 birds in all, and a statistical model turned those sightings into 130 (standard error 21). The model also estimated that bustards occupy about 16 percent of the surveyed area at any time.

That 16 percent is the report’s own wording. Some news coverage of the report called it 16 percent of the potential habitat, which is a different base.

The estimate leaves out ground. The survey frame omitted about 2,000 sq km in the south of Desert National Park, about 1,000 sq km of restricted parts of the Pokhran firing range and a further 1,440 sq km around Rasla, so WII compared 2017 and 2025 only on the grid cells common to both. Gujarat was not part of it either. The method is distance sampling, where observers record how far each sighting is from the line they travel, which is a different job from the camera-trap photography used for tigers (see how India counts its tigers and lions).

Four females in Kutch and a thin record elsewhere

In the Rajya Sabha on 18 December 2025, Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav said Rajasthan has 140 bustards and Kutch in Gujarat has 4 females. Congress MP Shaktisinh Gohil had put the Kutch figure at 3. ThePrint’s PTI report of 10 July 2026 also says three females are believed to survive there, which makes natural breeding in Kutch close to impossible.

For Maharashtra and the southern states the most detailed public figures date from 2019. Down To Earth reported on 16 April 2019 that WII’s national total was 150 birds: about 120 in Rajasthan (standard error 19), 10 in Gujarat, 1 to 8 in Maharashtra, and 10 to 12 in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh combined. Sutirtha Dutta of WII told the magazine the southern tally came from local people, not from a systematic survey. The 2024 to 2025 report does not cover any of these states.

Wires, and the arithmetic behind the blame

WII’s January 2019 mitigation proposal, released under a Right to Information request, calls power lines the most important current threat to the bustard, because the bird has poor frontal vision and a heavy flight. Surveys along 80 km of lines found 289 carcasses of around 40 species. After correcting for carcasses that decayed or were missed, WII scaled that to about 84,000 birds a year within 4,200 sq km in and around Desert National Park.

For the bustard itself the evidence is thinner. The document counts six deaths between 2017 and 2020, all on high-tension lines, and extrapolates to about 16 deaths a year from a population of about 128. It calls that rate unsustainable. Two of ten birds fitted with GPS tags in Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra died in power-line collisions. A peer-reviewed paper from WII, by Uddin and five co-authors, including Dutta and Yadvendradev Jhala, in Biological Conservation in 2021, estimated about 88,000 bird deaths a year in the area surveyed, according to SciDev.Net, and concluded that the bustard is at imminent risk of extinction from power-line mortality.

The 2024 to 2025 report adds that power lines, farm fencing, roads, water sources and solar plants have all expanded since 2017, and that bustard sightings cluster in flat grassland with no energy infrastructure, mainly in and around the northern enclosures of Desert National Park and the Pokhran range. Nilgai and wild pigs have spread across the area. Rajasthan’s solar parks, such as Bhadla, are covered in the piece on India’s solar capacity.

Three orders on the same wires

In April 2021 a bench of Chief Justice S A Bobde and Justices A S Bopanna and V Ramasubramanian ordered, according to The Leaflet, that low-voltage lines in bustard habitat identified by WII in Rajasthan and Gujarat go underground within a year, with bird diverters on lines until then. It also set up a three-member committee to examine whether high-voltage lines could follow. Bar and Bench puts the area covered at nearly 99,000 sq km.

On 21 March 2024 a bench of Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud and Justices J B Pardiwala and Manoj Misra (2024 INSC 280) largely overturned the 2021 order and appointed a new expert committee. Amrita Pankaj Satija wrote in Down To Earth on 30 May 2026 that the judgment centred on a 13,663 sq km priority area drawn from WII data, set against a potential area of about 80,000 sq km, and that it declared a right to be free from the adverse effects of climate change under Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution. She criticised the retreat, arguing that the committee was given no minimum conservation target, no population floor and no deadline.

On 19 December 2025 Justices P S Narasimha and Atul Chandurkar gave the final judgment. Bar and Bench reported revised priority areas of 14,013 sq km in Rajasthan and 740 sq km in Gujarat, undergrounding of 80 km of 33 kV lines in Rajasthan and 79 km in Gujarat, undergrounding of 250 km of high-risk lines that WII identified, and rerouting of some 66 kV lines, with the main measures due within two years. The law firm AMSS Shardul’s note on the judgment says no new wind turbines and no new solar plants above 2 MW are allowed in the revised priority areas, that bird diverters are not accepted as a substitute for the mandated measures, and that the environment ministry monitors the roll-out.

From wild eggs to a chick born by artificial insemination

Since 2019 the Bustard Recovery Program has collected eggs laid by wild bustards and hatched them in incubators. Mongabay reported on 10 April 2025 that 42 eggs had been collected, that 30 birds in captivity came from them, and that these founders had been breeding in captivity since March 2023, producing 20 chicks, seven of them in 2025 so far. Dutta told Mongabay: “At least now the species is not going to go extinct entirely.”

In October 2024 a male chick named Arambh hatched after artificial insemination, National Geographic reported on 30 January 2025. His father Suda was trained to mount a padded wooden model of a squatting female, and staff collected the semen in a petri dish. It was used on Toni, a female chosen because she was genetically distinct. The International Fund for Houbara Conservation in Abu Dhabi provided the artificial-insemination training. A BBC report republished by Human Progress called it the first successful hatching of a bustard chick through artificial insemination, and officials said it could lead to a sperm bank.

ThePrint reported on 13 March 2026 that the two centres then held 70 birds, up from 16 four years earlier. The PTI report of 4 October 2026 gives 97: 40 hatched from wild-laid eggs and 57 from captive breeding, with 86 kept for breeding and 11 earmarked for release. It counts 24 live chicks in 2025 and 29 in 2026.

The Kutch eggs and the release at Sam

Natural breeding in Kutch is considered nearly impossible with so few females, so the programme sends eggs there. In the “jumpstart” method an incubated fertile egg from the captive programme is placed in a wild female’s nest and she raises the chick. The first such chick hatched at Naliya in Kutch on 26 March 2026, after its egg was moved about 770 km by road from Rajasthan. The chick went missing in April, and forest officials suspect predators. A second chick born on 21 May 2026 had passed its first 40 days when the minister announced it, ThePrint reported on 10 July 2026.

On Saturday 3 October 2026 Yadav took part in the first stage of the release from a soft-release facility, PTI reported, and News On AIR reported the two males released at Sam on 4 October. Mongabay had reported in April 2025 that the team planned to begin releases in 2026 and that the release protocol was still being developed. National Geographic reported that chicks meant for release are not imprinted on humans and are fitted with radio trackers at three to six months old.

What is still unsettled

No single current count exists for the whole country. The last all-India figure in the sources above, 150 from WII’s 2018 report as Down To Earth relayed it in 2019, predates the 2024 to 2025 survey, and part of it came from local reports. The ministry’s 140 for Rajasthan in December 2025 and WII’s 130 (standard error 21) are not in conflict, because 140 sits inside the error, but they are not the same measurement.

The reports also disagree on the artificial-insemination timeline. ThePrint says India’s first captive-bred chick hatched in April 2023 after artificial insemination, while Mongabay dates captive breeding by founders from March 2023 and National Geographic dates the artificial-insemination hatch to October 2024. The reports on the December 2025 judgment differ in detail too: Bar and Bench and AMSS Shardul describe the limit on wind and solar projects, and Verdictum’s summary of the same judgment does not mention it.

The power-line death rate rests on six recorded bustard deaths scaled up by area, as WII’s own document sets out. The reports of the 4 October 2026 release say nothing yet on tracking or survival. The Kutch chick hatched in March went missing in April, and the PTI report lists 11 of the 97 captive birds as earmarked for release.