NEW DELHI, October 7 — The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) on Wednesday announced that the Secretariat of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands has formally designated two additional Indian wetlands—the Nanjarayan Bird Sanctuary in Tamil Nadu and Ansupa Lake in Odisha—as Wetlands of International Importance, taking the national Ramsar registry to 87 sites.
According to ecological dossiers submitted by the Wildlife Division, the Nanjarayan Bird Sanctuary, located along the Sarkar Samakulam basin in Tiruppur district, constitutes a vital staging and wintering biome for over 180 migratory avian species navigating the Central Asian Flyway. Concurrently, Ansupa Lake in Cuttack district represents the largest natural freshwater oxbow lake in Odisha, nestled within the Mahanadi flood basin, harboring rare aquatic macrophyte communities and endemic freshwater fisheries.
The Environment Minister remarked that with 87 designated sites encompassing over 1.33 million hectares, India sustains the largest network of Ramsar biomes in South Asia and the third-largest globally. The expansion operationalizes the objectives of the Centre's 'Amrit Dharohar' scheme, introduced in the Union Budget to encourage community-led conservation, nature tourism livelihoods, and ecological carbon sequestration across declared wetland sanctuaries.
The legal provisions of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (1971), the Montreux Record mechanism, the Wetlands (Conservation and Management) Rules 2017, and India's biodiversity targets under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework represent recurring subjects across UPSC Civil Services (GS-III: Environment & Ecology). Candidates should recall that the Ramsar Convention was signed on February 2 February 1971 in Ramsar, Iran (commemorated annually as World Wetlands Day), with India ratifying the treaty on February 1, 1982. Tamil Nadu commands the highest number of Ramsar sites (18) among Indian states.