It was May and the Nawabganj Bird Sanctuary in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh was blooming with pink lotus. The wetland had water pumped into it from Sharda Canal – one of the oldest and largest irrigation systems in the state – to ease the nesting of open-billed stork and black-necked ibis.

“These birds feed on the fishlings and thus maintaining water becomes crucial,” range officer Vivek Singh explained. “If we don’t maintain the water, these birds will find a different habitat to nest and won’t come back the next year, if they prefer the new site.”

If the birds decide to move on, Singh’s efforts of maintaining the wetland will be questioned, and its status could change to “unpreserved”. The burden to not let go of the Ramsar site status is real, as criterion 6 to identify a wetland of international importance says it should regularly support 20,000 or more waterbirds. “The wetlands which don’t have this pressure to be the bird habitat can let the ecosystems be,” Singh said. “They face heatstrokes and it actually helps them in nutrient building, time to time.”

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.

Uttar Pradesh is dotted with diverse wetlands ranging from the wet grasslands of the Terai, the riverine wetlands of the Gangetic plains and the ponds and tanks of the Vindhyan hills and plateau. As per the 

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