If there’s one certain takeaway from this blog, it’s the enduring and growing love for the feathered friends. In India, the conservation debate often touches on the Great Indian Bustard (GIB), which has an ostrich-like appearance and is labelled as “critically endangered.” In fact, the world population of the GIB is pegged at 150, with India, particularly Rajasthan, being home to 70 per cent of this number. Loss of the Bustard’s dry grasslands and scrub habitat, increased hunting and changes in land use have been blamed but Dr Pramod Patil refused to let things settle at that. Precisely why his pioneering work in protecting the Bustard population in Thar desert of Rajasthan won him the Whitley Award this year. Popularly known as the ‘Green Oscar’ and also won by compatriot Dr Ananda Kumar for his system to reduce man-elephant conflicts in India, the award carries a grant of £35,000. More importantly, it puts the focus back on the Great bird.

Focused on the landscape approach in conservation over restricting species a few particular areas, Dr Patil is the advocacy officer of the Bombay Natural History Society’s Great Indian Bustard Project. Also a member of the IUCN Species Survival Commission of India, he looks at a decentralized system of conservation – distributing funds and vesting decision-making at the local level than with central governments, not to forget involving local communities in spreading awareness. Another task is to do away with the notion that grasslands are wastelands. Equipping forest guards to tackle poaching of the Bustard and to control over-grazing are his other priorities.

Having won official protection for the Bustard’s crucial breeding habitat at the Gangewadi grasslands near the Nannaj Wildlife Sanctuary in Maharashtra, Dr Patil is now concentrating his efforts on the Thar desert, where the largest remaining population of the Great Indian Bustard is found.

Realising that individuals must have institutional support for massive undertakings such as saving charismatic species like the Great Indian Bustard, Dr. Patil, an affable, but relentless communicator, also works closely with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Birdlife International, U.K. While fatalists have begun writing lengthy eulogies for the endangered Great Indian Bustard, Dr. Pramod Patil remains determinedly adamant to reverse their decline by winning the support of local communities, government officials and experts in the task of protecting the bird, together with its vanishing grasslands. SOURCE: Sanctuary Asia