India has launched its first national guide to grasslands and other open natural ecosystems, challenging the long-standing “wasteland” label for deserts, scrublands and ravines.
The document maps diverse landscapes, highlights their biodiversity, soil carbon and pastoral livelihoods, and urges climate and land policies to move beyond tree-centric restoration that has often damaged these vital rangelands.
For decades, India’s grasslands, scrublands, ravines, and deserts have carried a bureaucratic insult: “wasteland.”
The word has appeared in revenue records, land-use maps, and government documents, reducing landscapes that are ecologically rich and socially productive to land that is considered empty simply because it does not have trees.
This classification has consequences. It has helped push tree plantations, solar parks and other development projects into landscapes that were never barren. They were, and remain, ecosystems with their own plants, animals, soils, water cycles and human communities.
On August 17, 2026, at the 17th Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD COP17) in Ulaanbaatar, India took a step towards correcting this long-standing error.
It launched its first Guide to Grasslands and Other Open Natural Ecosystems of India. For the first time, grasslands, savannas, deserts, scrublands, ravines and rocky plateaus have been brought together in a national document as ecosystems in their own right rather than as landscapes waiting to be turned into forests.
Union environment minister Bhupender Yadav, speaking virtually at the launch, brought a personal dimension to the discussion.
He spoke of growing up in Ajmer, Rajasthan, among grazing lands and desert scrub that were often dismissed by outsiders as wasteland. Local communities, however, understood these landscapes differently.
Traditional systems such as oran and gauchar were not simply pieces of common land. They were part of a functioning social and ecological system. Villages depended on them for grazing; livestock supported rural livelihoods; and communities, in turn, maintained rules around the use of these lands.
The distinction is important because much of India’s approach to grasslands has been shaped by a forest-centric idea of ecological restoration.
The question has too often been: Where are the trees?
It should instead be: What is this landscape already doing?
A grassland without trees is not necessarily a degraded forest. A scrubland is not necessarily land waiting for a plantation. And a desert is not an ecological failure.
The new guide has been developed by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) in collaboration with organisations and institutions including the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Centre of Excellence on Sustainable Land Management, Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education and the Space Applications Centre of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).
It documents India’s Open Natural Ecosystems (ONEs) across different landscapes.
These include the Himalayan and Terai grasslands, the Thar desert and Banni grasslands of Gujarat, Deccan savannas, Aravalli scrublands, the Yamuna-Chambal ravines, rocky plateaus of the Western Ghats, grasslands of the central Nicobar Islands and Tamil Nadu’s Theri Kaadu scrub landscapes.
Importantly, the guide does not describe these ecosystems only through the lens of biodiversity.
It looks at geography, soils, hydrology, fire regimes and carbon storage. It also examines pastoralism and the communities whose livelihoods have evolved around these landscapes.
That is significant because fire, grazing and seasonal movement are often treated as disturbances in conventional conservation planning. In many open ecosystems, however, they are part of the ecological process itself.
The stakes are not academic.
India’s open ecosystems support species such as the Great Indian Bustard, Lesser Florican, Bengal Florican, Indian wolf and blackbuck. Many of these species require open landscapes, not forests.
For a bird such as the Great Indian Bustard, a plantation in the wrong place is not restoration. It can remove the open habitat the species needs and alter the landscape in ways that make survival more difficult.
Yet the instinct to plant trees has remained deeply embedded in India’s environmental policy.
Afforestation targets, green-cover ambitions and carbon-focused programmes can create an incentive to put trees wherever land is perceived to be degraded. Lands classified as wasteland have consequently been vulnerable to tree plantations, industrial projects and renewable energy installations.
The problem is compounded by the fact that India did not, for a long time, even have a comprehensive national understanding of its grasslands and other open natural ecosystems.
A 2018 government committee report on grasslands had acknowledged the absence of a working national inventory and a comprehensive conservation framework.
Without knowing what exists, it becomes difficult to protect it.
The debate also challenges a common assumption about carbon sequestration.
Forests store large quantities of carbon in trees, making their carbon value easy to see. Grasslands and other open ecosystems store significant carbon below ground, in roots and soils.
This carbon can remain locked away for long periods.
Disturbing an established grassland for plantation or other land-use change can therefore have consequences that are not captured by simply counting the number of trees planted.
This is where climate policy and ecosystem conservation need to become more closely aligned.
A landscape should not be considered climate-friendly merely because it has acquired tree cover.
Perhaps the most important aspect of the new guide is its recognition that open ecosystems cannot be separated from the people who use them.
India’s rangelands support millions of pastoralists, including the Raikas of Rajasthan, Dhangars of Maharashtra and Gujjars and Bakarwals of the Himalayas.
For generations, pastoral communities have managed grazing, seasonal migration, fire and water according to local ecological conditions.
Institutions such as orans and gauchars are examples of community-based systems that governed common resources long before modern conservation laws came into existence.
Yet these communities have often found themselves on the wrong side of formal land administration, with customary use treated as encroachment rather than stewardship.
Recognising their role in a national ecological guide does not solve that problem. But it changes the starting point.
The question is no longer simply how communities should be prevented from using these landscapes. It is whether policy can learn from the ways in which communities have maintained them.
This is where the real test begins. The guide is an important scientific and policy intervention, but it does not automatically give grasslands legal protection.
India has an established legal and administrative framework for forests, including provisions governing forest diversion and wildlife protection. There is no comparable, comprehensive framework for grasslands and other open natural ecosystems.
That leaves a fundamental question: What happens when an ecosystem identified in the guide comes into conflict with a development proposal?
There is also the problem of land records.
As long as revenue and other official records continue to describe ecologically valuable landscapes as “wasteland”, “degraded land” or similar categories, their vulnerability will remain.
Changing these classifications across states will be a long administrative exercise. But without it, better ecological maps may have limited power on the ground.
There is another tension that India will have to confront.
The country’s climate strategy places considerable emphasis on increasing forest and tree cover. At the same time, protecting open ecosystems requires recognising that more trees do not always mean more ecological value.
Carbon accounting will therefore have to become more sophisticated.
If policy rewards only visible tree biomass, intact grasslands and rangelands will continue to lose out. Soil carbon, below-ground biomass and the ecological functions of open landscapes need to be properly accounted for.
Otherwise, climate policy could inadvertently encourage the destruction of ecosystems in the name of restoring them.
The guide calls for stronger land-degradation assessment and landscape-level planning. India’s Land Degradation Neutrality commitments under the UNCCD provide an existing policy framework.
The challenge is implementation. That will require better mapping, long-term ecological monitoring and sustained research. ISRO’s involvement in documenting these ecosystems could be particularly useful as India develops more detailed spatial information about their extent and condition.
But maps alone will not be enough. The future of these landscapes will ultimately depend on governance and whether existing community institutions are strengthened or displaced.
For orans, gauchars and pastoral landscapes, conservation cannot simply be imposed from outside. It has to account for the people who have lived with and managed these ecosystems for generations.
Launching the guide at UNCCD COP17 is also a signal beyond India.
Rangelands cover a substantial share of the world’s land surface and support hundreds of millions of people through pastoralism and livestock-based livelihoods. Yet they have often remained secondary in global conversations on biodiversity, climate change and land restoration.
India has a reason to put them at the centre of that conversation.
It has extensive drylands and grasslands, a large pastoral population and a long history of community-based management of open ecosystems. It also has a policy history that shows what can happen when ecological restoration is equated too closely with tree planting.
The success of this guide, therefore, will not be measured by how many copies are printed or how many landscapes are mapped.
It will be measured by what happens next.
Will “wasteland” eventually disappear from land records where it wrongly describes functioning ecosystems? Will the Great Indian Bustard get large, connected grassland habitats rather than isolated patches? Will pastoral communities find their knowledge reflected in land and conservation laws rather than merely acknowledged in government documents?
For decades, India has looked at ecological value through the canopy.
The more difficult task now is to look below it at the grass, the scrub, the soil, the grazing routes, the seasonal fires and the communities that have kept these landscapes alive.
What looks empty from a distance may, in fact, be one of the country’s most important living landscapes.
Based on official statements from the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change and PIB, and coverage of the guide's launch at UNCCD COP17, Ulaanbaatar, August 2026.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth