🌿 Environment & EcologyMAINS · GS3.14

Shekha Jheel becomes India's 99th Ramsar site

An Aligarh bird sanctuary is added to the list of Wetlands of International Importance, taking India one short of a century.

What happened

The Union Environment Minister announced the designation of Shekha Jheel Bird Sanctuary, in Aligarh district of Uttar Pradesh, as a Ramsar site — a Wetland of International Importance.
The addition takes India's national tally of Ramsar sites to 99, leaving the country one designation short of a symbolic century.
Uttar Pradesh's count rises to 12, consolidating its position among the States with the most Ramsar-listed wetlands in the country.
The Ministry highlighted that Shekha Jheel functions as a crucial stopover on the Central Asian Flyway, hosting migratory waterbirds during the winter season.
Named winter visitors include the Bar-headed Goose, the Painted Stork and several species of ducks, which use the shallow wetland as a feeding and roosting ground.
The Ministry framed the listing as a gain for local livelihoods, global biodiversity, and water and climate security, and the Minister encouraged the public to visit the site.

Background & context

A "Ramsar site" is not an Indian legal category at all — it is an international one. The designation flows from the Convention on Wetlands, an intergovernmental treaty signed in the Iranian city of Ramsar in 1971, which is why the wetlands listed under it are universally known as Ramsar sites. The Convention is the oldest of the modern multilateral environmental agreements and the only global treaty devoted to a single ecosystem type — wetlands. Its central instrument is the List of Wetlands of International Importance: a country that joins the Convention agrees to nominate at least one qualifying wetland to this list and to manage all its wetlands wisely.

India became a party to the Ramsar Convention in 1982, and its first listings — Chilika Lake in Odisha and Keoladeo National Park in Rajasthan — date from that year. For a long time India's tally grew slowly; the rapid expansion to a number approaching one hundred is a recent phenomenon, driven by a concentrated push to identify and notify qualifying wetlands across States. Shekha Jheel's listing belongs to that wave. The site is already protected at the State level as a bird sanctuary; the Ramsar tag layers an international recognition on top of that existing domestic status rather than replacing it.

The relevant administering chain is worth fixing in memory. Globally, the Convention is served by a Secretariat based in Gland, Switzerland, co-located with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN); its governing body is the Conference of the Contracting Parties (COP), which meets roughly every three years. Within India, the nodal authority is the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), which forwards nominations, and the day-to-day protection of any given wetland rests with the State forest and wildlife machinery. A wetland reaches the list only after the national government formally proposes it and the Secretariat enters it on the official register, so a Ramsar designation is a national act ratified by an international body, not a status a State can confer on its own.

It also helps to place this listing within the family of instruments that govern Indian wetlands, because exam questions routinely test whether an aspirant can tell them apart. Domestically, wetlands are managed under the Wetlands (Conservation and Management) Rules, 2017, framed under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, which require States to set up Wetland Authorities and prohibit certain activities in notified wetlands. Running parallel to the legal framework are conservation programmes such as the National Plan for Conservation of Aquatic Ecosystems (NPCA), the centrally-sponsored scheme that funds wetland and lake conservation, and the Amrit Dharohar initiative, which promotes community participation and nature tourism specifically at Ramsar sites. The Ramsar tag sits at the top of this stack as the international recognition; the Rules, the NPCA and Amrit Dharohar are the domestic machinery that actually delivers protection on the ground. Confusing the international designation with the domestic legal protection — assuming the Ramsar label by itself carries enforceable restrictions — is a classic trap.

For Prelims

Site: Shekha Jheel Bird Sanctuary, in Aligarh district, Uttar Pradesh — a shallow freshwater wetland in the Ganga plains.
Milestone: India's 99th Ramsar site; Uttar Pradesh's tally rises to 12.
Ecological role: a stopover on the Central Asian Flyway, one of the world's major migratory bird corridors, used by waterbirds moving between their Arctic and Central Asian breeding grounds and their South Asian wintering grounds.
Key migratory species named: Bar-headed Goose, Painted Stork, and various ducks — winter visitors.
The treaty: the Convention on Wetlands, signed at Ramsar, Iran, in 1971; entered into force in 1975.
India's accession: India has been a party since 1982; its earliest Ramsar sites were Chilika Lake (Odisha) and Keoladeo (Rajasthan).
What the list is called: the List of Wetlands of International Importance; secretariat at Gland, Switzerland (alongside IUCN).
The wider Ramsar vocabulary: a wetland on the list facing adverse ecological change can be placed on the Montreux Record; the Convention also defines a Wetland City Accreditation for urban areas that conserve their wetlands well.
Nodal authority in India: the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change forwards nominations; State forest departments manage the sites on the ground.
The comparative set (the early benchmarks): India's first two Ramsar sites (1982) were Chilika Lake, Odisha, and Keoladeo National Park, Rajasthan; the largest Indian Ramsar site is the Sundarbans (West Bengal); among the highest-altitude is Tso Moriri / Tsomoriri (Ladakh). Knowing the "firsts, largest and highest" of the set is how match-the-pairs and "how many" questions are survived.
Domestic machinery (do not confuse with the tag): the Wetlands (Conservation and Management) Rules, 2017 (under the Environment Protection Act, 1986), the NPCA conservation scheme, and the Amrit Dharohar initiative for Ramsar-site communities.

For UPSC: Shekha Jheel = India's 99th Ramsar site; Uttar Pradesh now has 12. The Ramsar Convention dates from 1971 (Ramsar, Iran); India has been a party since 1982. A Ramsar site is a "Wetland of International Importance" under an international treaty — it is NOT a national park, a wildlife sanctuary, a biosphere reserve, or a tiger reserve; those are domestic categories under Indian law. The international "in-danger" tag is the Montreux Record, not the IUCN Red List (the Red List ranks species, not sites).

Why it matters

Wetlands are among the most productive and most threatened ecosystems on the planet. They store and purify water, recharge aquifers, buffer floods, lock away carbon in waterlogged soils, and support a disproportionate share of biodiversity for the area they cover. Yet they are drained, filled and built over faster than almost any other habitat, because flat land near water is exactly what cities and farms want. A Ramsar designation does not stop development by itself, but it commits the government to the principle of "wise use" — maintaining the ecological character of the wetland while allowing sustainable human use — and it puts the site on an international register that makes neglect visible. For a wetland like Shekha Jheel, sitting in a densely farmed and rapidly urbanising stretch of the Gangetic plain, that visibility is the practical value of the tag.

The migratory-bird dimension is the second reason the listing matters. The Central Asian Flyway is a network of routes connecting breeding grounds in Siberia, the Arctic and Central Asia with wintering grounds across the Indian subcontinent. Birds on such a flyway cannot survive on their endpoints alone; they depend on an unbroken chain of stopover wetlands where they can rest and refuel mid-journey. The loss of even a few links in that chain can collapse populations that look healthy at either end. By securing one more stopover, the designation strengthens India's contribution to flyway-scale conservation, an effort India has formally committed to through its participation in the broader framework for migratory species. The site's named visitors — the high-altitude-flying Bar-headed Goose, the colonial-nesting Painted Stork, and assorted ducks — are exactly the species that such mid-route wetlands are meant to carry through the winter.

Finally, the number itself carries weight. India approaching a hundred Ramsar sites makes it one of the countries with the largest networks of internationally recognised wetlands in Asia, and the Ministry deliberately framed the 99th listing as the threshold of "a historic century". For the aspirant, the lesson is to track not just the headline number but its composition: which States dominate the tally, how recent the surge is, and the distinction between a wetland's domestic protected status and its international Ramsar status — the two are layered, not interchangeable.

For Mains

Data

India's Ramsar network reaching 99 sites, with Uttar Pradesh alone at 12, is a concrete data point for any answer on India's wetland-conservation record or its progress on international environmental commitments.

Exemplification

Shekha Jheel is a ready example of how a Central Asian Flyway stopover wetland functions, and of the difference between domestic protection (a State bird sanctuary) and international recognition (a Ramsar site) layered on the same patch of land.

Problematisation

The case exposes the gap between designation and protection: a Ramsar tag commits a country to "wise use" but does not, on its own, halt the drainage, encroachment and pollution that degrade wetlands in agrarian-urban landscapes — the Montreux Record exists precisely because listed sites can still deteriorate.

Way-forward

It points toward managing wetlands at the scale of the flyway rather than the individual site, integrating livelihood gains for surrounding communities so that local people become stakeholders in conservation rather than adversaries of it.

Position

The government's stated stance — conserving wetlands as part of an ecosystem-restoration mission, with the listing presented as a boost for livelihoods, biodiversity, and water and climate security — supplies the official position for answers on India's environmental diplomacy.

Deploys into: wetland conservation and the Ramsar framework · the Central Asian Flyway and migratory-species protection · India's record on international environmental conventions · the distinction between domestic protected areas and international ecological designations (GS3.14 conservation; GS2.18 international groupings/conventions).

Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change · 2026-04-22 · PRID 2254357 · PIB source ↗

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