India’s dry grasslands are recorded as wasteland, and the rarest animals live there

Open country is not damaged forest

A long-standing assumption in Indian land administration is that a landscape without trees is a landscape that has lost them. For much of the country’s dry western and central belt that is simply not the case: the grassland and thorn scrub there is an old, stable ecosystem with its own plants, its own grazing history and its own dependent animals.

These systems are shaped by drought and by grazing rather than by rainfall alone. Grasses that are cropped and recover, hardy thorn trees scattered rather than closed, and a shallow soil that never supported dense woodland — that is the natural state, not an interrupted stage on the way to forest.

The confusion is understandable, because genuinely degraded forest can look similar from a road. It matters, though, because the remedy prescribed for a wasteland is usually to plant it, and planting an ancient grassland destroys it as surely as clearing a forest destroys that.

The word on the revenue record has consequences

Much of this land is categorised in official records under headings that translate roughly as barren, waste or unproductive. That is an administrative description of agricultural value, but it travels a long way beyond its original meaning, because land recorded that way is the first choice for anything that needs a large flat site.

The result is that open habitat is quietly converted at a scale that forest never is, and without the debate that clearing forest would produce. Plantation drives, industrial siting, energy infrastructure and irrigation projects all favour exactly this ground, precisely because nobody is recorded as losing anything.

It is worth saying that this is contested rather than settled. Pastoral use, tree planting and renewable energy all have serious constituencies, and some of the land in question genuinely is degraded. The argument conservationists make is narrower than it is sometimes reported: that the classification cannot tell the difference, and so the decisions made on it are blind.

The animals of open ground are built for visibility, not cover

Grassland species solve their problems by seeing far and running fast rather than by hiding. Blackbuck, chinkara and the Indian wild ass all rely on distance, and in the dry season herds move considerably in search of grazing rather than holding small territories.

The Indian wolf lives on this country too, in small packs and largely on the edges of villages and grazing land, which is a very different existence from the wolf of colder forests. It is present across a good part of the dry belt and is seen far less often than its range would suggest.

The great Indian bustard is the species that has come to stand for the whole habitat. It is a large ground bird of open plains, it is now critically endangered, and the reason is straightforward: the habitat it needs is the habitat that has been converted. Anyone who sees one should understand it is an unusual piece of luck.

Looking for them is a different exercise from a tiger park

In a forest reserve you are driven along fixed tracks in a system built for controlled access, and sightings depend on being in the right place at the right hour. Open country reverses most of that. Sight lines are long, animals are often visible from a public road, and the skill is in scanning rather than in stalking.

Several dedicated grassland sanctuaries exist — in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and elsewhere — and some of the best open habitat is not in a sanctuary at all but in ordinary grazing land beside villages. Access rules, permitted vehicles and whether a guide is required differ from one to the next, and are set by the state forest department, so the current position for the specific site is the thing to check.

Binoculars matter more here than a long lens, and patience at one vantage point beats covering ground. A grassland gives everything up slowly and then all at once, when a herd that was invisible against dry grass stands and turns.

Season and light do most of the work

Grass is tall and green after the rains, which is beautiful and also makes low animals hard to pick out. As the dry months advance the cover shortens, water concentrates, and animals become far easier to find, so the second half of the cool season is generally the productive window.

Winter also brings raptors. Harriers migrate into Indian grasslands from further north and roost communally on the ground in these habitats, which is one of the more striking things to watch at dusk anywhere in the country, and it is entirely dependent on open ground being left open.

The light is the last argument for going. Flat country, low sun and a lot of sky produce the long golden hours that make photographs of open country memorable, and the same hours are when the animals move. It is not a subtle correlation, and it does not need to be.