The Challenges In UP’s Wetland Conservation

This move placed these lands under Category 6(1), or non-agricultural land covered with water--making them legally untransferable to any individual or entity. “Land records since British times have been designed to meet revenue needs of the government,” Singh told IndiaSpend. “Although forests and rivers find a place within the land classification system, wetlands do not have a distinctly identified place in the system.” Placing lands under Category 6(1) “made sure that nobody could get this land registered in their name, nor could they build on it”, Singh said.

Singh’s team had distributed the district-wise list of wetlands--based on maps from the Space Application Centre under the Union environment ministry’s National Inventory and Assessment Project--to the relevant district collectors. These lists were then verified by field officers, collated with existing land records, and updated on the online portal Bhulekh. It was these records that would serve as the foundation for a complex and contested demarcation process now playing out across the state.

Wetlands occur wherever water meets land. These could be mangroves, peatlands, marshes, rivers and lakes, deltas, floodplains and flooded forests, rice-fields, and even coral reefs. The 2011 National Wetland Atlas documented over 757,000 wetlands across India covering an area of 15.2 million hectares. Some of these, considered of international importance as designated under the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, are recognised as Ramsar sites--currently, 91 such sites have been identified, covering 1.5 million hectares.

Ramsar Convention calls wetlands indispensable for the ecosystem services they provide--from freshwater supply, food and building materials, and biodiversity, to flood control, groundwater recharge, and climate change mitigation. Yet studies show that wetland area and quality continue to decline in most regions of the world, including in India.

The 2025 Global Wetland Outlook found that the average rate of wetland loss was -0.52% per annum, with millions of hectares of wetlands lost due to land-use change. The report estimated 22% of global wetlands have been lost since 1970--most dramatically in freshwater ecosystems.

The Wetlands (Conservation and Management) Rules, 2017, notified by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), provide a legal framework for identifying and notifying wetlands, regulating activities, and setting up State Wetland Authorities. To strengthen conservation, the government launched the Amrit Dharohar scheme in 2023. This initiative focuses on encouraging community participation in the conservation of Ramsar sites and integrating wetland preservation with sustainable livelihoods.

Uttar Pradesh is dotted with diverse wetlands ranging from wet grasslands of the Terai, riverine wetlands of the Gangetic plains, and ponds and tanks of the Vindhyan hills and plateau. These wetlands play a central role in ensuring food and water security to the region, and are icons of cultural diversity. Singh said that “conserving these fragile ecosystems is a high policy priority for the state”, also acknowledging the high biodiversity values including the iconic Sarus Crane, the state bird, which inhabit the shallow agricultural wetlands of the state, and the Swamp Deer which is the state animal.

The case of Talab Baghel

On a sweltering May afternoon in Payagpur village of Bahraich district, about 120 km northeast of Lucknow, Hari Shankar Patel paused from addressing a long queue of citizens with land-related queries to field a question from this reporter. Patel, a Naib Tehsildar (a key official in the revenue administration who performs the functions of a sub-registrar), called someone to get the order dated August 2024 by the National Green Tribunal (NGT) that directed the Bahraich administration “to ensure the demarcation, installation of white boundary pillars, and preservation measures for Talab Baghel Wetland”.

Talab Baghel, the largest inland natural lake in the district, spans 1,383 hectares, according to the Wetlands of India portal. (Talab is Hindi for ‘lake’. The panchayat where the lake exists is also called Talab Baghel). The Bhulekh website categorises 567 hectares of this area as wetland, Category 6(1). Acting on the NGT’s directive, a 10-member revenue department team identified 441 hectares of revenue land--comprising 40 land parcels--under the wetland category. This was put into motion in November 2024.

The task seemed a straightforward three-step exercise: consult the revenue records to look up the 6(1) category in Talab Baghel panchayat, identify that land parcel on the ground, and demarcate it.

This was exactly as Singh had envisioned it in 2016 when the identification was done as per the wetlands mapped by the Space Application Centre.

“The process of measurement and demarcation is underway,” Patel told IndiaSpend. “We are planting pillars around this area to mark a clear boundary. There are some conflicts, but the revenue officers are handling it.”

Shatranjan Badhai (64), however, refused to be ‘handled’. He recalled how in January 2025, when his land was submerged, “DM saab [district magistrate] ordered the erection of poles”. “Wo khet hamara hai, aapne kaise khamba gadwa diya [That land is ours, how can they erect poles there],” he asked, his voice quivering with anger.

He was told that the land belonged to the government and would be developed--part of an eco-tourism project undertaken by the Uttar Pradesh State Tourism Development Corporation to promote the wetland's natural biodiversity.

“We have the documents; this land was allotted to us. Where exactly is your pond's area in this?,” asks Shatranjan Badhai, a resident of Talab Baghel panchayat.

“We restricted the exercise and pulled out the pole they had planted on our land,” Badhai said, brandishing a polythene package of documents. “We have the documents; this land was allotted to us. Where exactly is your pond's area in this?”

Badhai lives in Subhash Nagar Colony, a Bengali refugee settlement in the gram panchayat. The language, the motifs on the women’s sarees and the slight accent in their Hindi all reflect the Bengali origins of the residents here, where 104 families live. Badhai’s father had made it here from Bangladesh in 1958, and was allotted a patta (title) against 5 acres of land adjoining the wetland. Now, 67 years later, that inheritance lies in conflict with a conservation project.

Farming the marsh: Informal occupation, gradual reclamation

When Badhai had started farming on this land, he could grow only one crop as the land remained submerged for the rest of the year. Over years, the area dried up; there was less water, more land. And more people--many of them unknown--arrived to farm the land.

“People from neighbouring villages started sowing on these lands and said it was theirs,” Badhai recalls. “I never tried to question much. Why should I invite trouble?”

At sunset, as patches of water in the gigantic Talab Baghel reflected the golden light, cattle herder Ranjit Singh (56) stood on the road passing through this wetland, waiting for his buffaloes to finish bathing in whatever water was available. “Look around and see how well agriculture is flourishing here,” he said. “There’s sugarcane, maize and what not. But not everyone who is growing this has land registered on their names.”

Ranjit Singh’s buffaloes bathing in the waters in Talab Baghel.

Satellite imagery from 2017 to 2025 supports their observations: the continuous water body has splintered into disconnected patches, especially along the eastern and southern edges, further shrinking into narrower streams and isolated patches. Simultaneously, the checkerboard pattern of farmland has expanded steadily, replacing marshy soil with uniform tilled rows.

Pawan Singh, interim revenue officer of Talab Baghel, is overseeing this demarcation. “The more the wetland is drying up, the more agricultural lands are cropping up,” he said. “When we demarcate this encroached area, people contest.”

Satellite imagery shows Talab Baghel has splintered into disconnected patches, even as farmland has expanded.

Resistance and reluctance

Sub-divisional magistrate Dinesh Kumar Maurya of Payagpur irritably insisted there was “no challenge, no conflict” in the demarcation process, but a little prodding reveals roadblocks.

In 2019, a team of people along with Rohit Shukla, revenue officer for villages adjoining Talab Baghel, had undertaken a similar exercise. The problem, he said, was that there is no proper legal or physical division of this wetland.

“Minjumla” is the term he used to describe the land ownership of Talab Baghel--a specific category of land that is recorded as a single unit in the revenue records but is actually composed of multiple small plots or parcels of land owned by different individuals. Demarcation is possible only between May 15 and June 15 each year, when the area is not waterlogged, and the demarcations vanish after rains come. “Every year this demarcation is done, it’s nothing new,” Shukla told IndiaSpend.

“People who take their cattle for grazing and bathing here uproot the pillars which were planted to demarcate the wetland,” Pawan Singh told IndiaSpend. “We have given verbal notices to people who are practising agriculture in the wetland area without any documents.” The demarcation process is ongoing and he couldn’t put a definitive end date to it, he said.

“Baghel is a sad story,” said Ashish Tiwari, principal chief conservator of forests, Uttar Pradesh. “The entire region is fragmented into agricultural land, and the water channel which overflowed and filled this wetland is broken. It’s dried up.”

Back in 1997, Tiwari recalled, he had gone boating in Talab Baghel--the water level was that high. Hundreds of thousands of birds could be seen flocking there. Today, demarcation faces seasonal constraints: pillars vanish during monsoons, the land fills with water again, and the process must start all over again.

It was during his tenure as the state’s director of environment, forest and climate change that Ramgarh Taal was notified as a wetland in Uttar Pradesh. It had taken three years to overcome the red tape. Tiwari recognises that recording wetlands formally is the first step towards conserving them.

“The entire region is fragmented into agricultural land, and the water channel which overflowed and filled this wetland is broken. It’s dried up,” says Ashish Tiwari, principal chief conservator of forests, Uttar Pradesh.

Only after the identification exercise did Singh find that the number of wetlands finally recorded were higher than those listed in the State Wetlands Atlas--they found 133,484 wetlands, 10% more than the 121,242 mapped in the Atlas. “In only 19 districts did the list of wetlands as indicated in the Atlas correspond with the field records,” Singh recalled.

In a report submitted to the NGT by the MoEFCC on the status of significant wetlands in the country, Uttar Pradesh was the only state that declared that “all wetlands recorded in revenue records”.

Neeraj Kumar, secretary of the State Wetland Authority, acknowledged that many wetlands were once recorded as “wastelands”, making them easier to transfer to private entities. “Notifying them would add a layer of legal protection,” he said, without offering any updates on such notifications.

Regarding resolving land conflicts over wetlands in rural areas, Tiwari smiled: “It’s not as easy as one might imagine.”

Mapping meets reality

Venkatesh Dutta, professor at the School of Earth & Environmental Sciences at Lucknow’s Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, has over two decades of experience in catchment planning, river restoration and eco-hydrology. When he visited Mau district--some 300 km away from Bahraich--last year, he witnessed large wetlands that could be declared as Ramsar sites. There was only one problem.

“We found land parcels within the wetlands. There was 5-6 metres deep water in this area, how could anybody have private land within this wetland?”

Dutta’s investigation revealed that the land parcel was recorded as a wetland because of a local muscleman who had acquired the original farmer’s land, and was then allotted this alternate land during resettlement. Dutta and his team met with district authorities and got between 25-30 such private land parcels freed from conflict.

Ritesh Kumar, director of Wetlands International, a non-profit working on conservation and restoration of wetlands, refrains from using the word ‘conflict’, which more often than not acts as a cover against the push for ground-truthing of wetlands. “This is not going to be a black and white story,” Kumar said. “Not everything will be accurate, but this is an opportunity to raise rational questions against encroachments.”

In Unnao, about 190 km from Bahraich, junior assistant Abhinav Shukla was elbow-deep in files at the district’s Special Land Acquisition Office. Between telephone calls, he pulled out the three-sheet Supreme Court order in the case of Anand Arya vs Union of India. The order directed state authorities to ground-truth wetlands identified in the SAC Atlas 2021.

A second printout contained a list of all the wetlands marked by satellite imagery, along with their geographic coordinates and handwritten names of specific villages and blocks. These coordinates now guide the demarcation work across six tehsils (sub-districts). If a land parcel matches a wetland, it gets a KML file and, eventually, white boundary pillars.

But even here, ground-truths conflict with satellite views. “Some of these identified lands have houses on them, others have some private properties,” sub-divisional magistrate Pramesh Srivastava said on the phone. “Upar se unhe sab pani dikh raha hai (Everything looks like water from above).”

How then will he resolve these conflicts? “Only time will tell,” he said, sounding exhausted.

Satellite Imagery folder: Contains Talab Baghel satellite images with specified Month and year

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