Wetlands and Ramsar sites in India

Wetlands — marshes, lakes, floodplains, mangroves, estuaries and even rice paddies in the broad sense — store water, recharge groundwater, buffer floods, filter pollutants and support fish, birds and farming. They are often treated as wasteland because their value appears only when they fail: a drained floodplain floods a town, a lost mangrove leaves a coast exposed to a storm, a polluted lake kills a fishery.

International recognition comes through the Ramsar Convention, an intergovernmental treaty adopted in 1971 for wetlands of international importance, especially as waterfowl habitat. India became a party on 1 February 1982, with Chilika Lake in Odisha and Keoladeo National Park in Rajasthan as its first designated sites. By September 2025 the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change reported 93 Ramsar sites, including two new Bihar sites, Gokul Jalashay and Udaipur Jheel, and Tamil Nadu had the most sites of any state.

Domestically, the Wetlands (Conservation and Management) Rules, 2017, require states to identify wetlands and restrict harmful activities in notified sites, with state wetland authorities playing the central role. Critics note that many wetlands remain unnotified, that urban wetlands are under particular pressure from construction and waste, and that a Ramsar label alone does not stop encroachment or pollution without local enforcement and monitoring.

The policy lesson is that a wetland is infrastructure. Protecting it is usually cheaper than replacing its flood control, water purification and fishery services with concrete, pumps and treatment plants — but only if the people who depend on it, from fishers to farmers to city residents, have a say in how it is managed. Regular monitoring of water quality, bird counts and encroachment gives an early warning that a one-off survey cannot provide. Citizen bird counts and fisher catch records, where they are collected consistently, can strengthen that monitoring at low cost.