Barragewali Jheel: the Ganga wetland that became India's forty-seventh Ramsar site

Background

The Haiderpur wetland lies near the Bijnor barrage on the Ganga in Uttar Pradesh, and it took shape after the Madhya Ganga Barrage was built. It spreads over nearly 69 sq km, sits inside the Hastinapur Wildlife Sanctuary and was added to the Ramsar list as India's 47th site. People living around it call it Barragewali Jheel. More than 25,000 waterbirds depend on it, among them greylag and bar-headed geese, ducks and waders, and threatened breeders such as the Indian skimmer, the black-bellied tern, the bronze-winged jacana, the sarus crane and the steppe eagle. Gangetic river dolphins, turtles, gharials, mugger crocodiles and golden mahseer live in its waters, while leopards, wild boar, spotted deer and wild cats use the land around. Uttar Pradesh has one of the richest wetland networks in the country, covering about 4 per cent of the State's area, and it has ten Ramsar sites, among them the Nawabganj, Saman, Samaspur and Sandi bird sanctuaries, Sarsai Nawar Jheel, Sur Sarovar and the Upper Ganga River stretch. Satellite studies show the State lost nearly 2.5 lakh hectares of wetland, about a fifth of the total, over eight years. Water chestnut, grown over about nine square kilometres of the wetland, is one of the crops the villages around it live on, and Haiderpur is one of the wetlands, with Bakhira, Sur Sarovar, Samaspur and Nawabganj, in which the State has put money into visitor facilities.