Keshopur-Miani Wetland: India’s First Community Reserve

On a December morning in 2024, driving along one of Punjab’s misty highways, the last thing I expect to see just off the road is a swamp packed with 10,000-odd birds.

Punjab’s landscape holds few surprises. For several hundred kilometres, flat, rolling paddy fields stretch to the horizon in the same shade of green. The road’s edges are lined with eucalyptus and poplar trees, their barks plastered with posters advertising agents for visas to Canada, the UK, and Australia. It all seems the same until we park at a spot, walk off the road, and face an endless mosaic that is part marsh, part pond, and part farm.

It is just past 7 am. The sun, a red globe of fire, rises from the horizon, the fog retreats, and the Keshopur-Miani Wetland reveals itself. Crowded, chaotic, cacophonous — the landscape is packed with cackling birds, scampering around farmers working in hip-deep mulch. Common teals — brown-headed ducks with a striking green swatch behind their eye — swim in coordinated flocks. Excited bronze-winged jacanas tiptoe on the floating vegetation, mewing like cats. At one end, the swamp is a glassy mirror, reflecting the crimson shades of dawn. The other end is starkly eerie — dense with drying lotus stems jutting out at odd angles from dark waters, their shrivelled leaves droop like a hundred tattered umbrellas.

As I try to identify all the birds I see, Amadad Mahsif, 72, emerges from the mulch. He casually brushes aside lotus stems and ambles through the slop, sending swamp hens scurrying. His arms and legs are covered with mud, but a wide smile creases his weathered face, and his thinning silver hair shines in the sun. He hands me a lotus root, a chalky white stump. “Bags and bags of this will travel to markets in Jammu,” he says.

Mahsif has seen the wetland since he was a child. He grew up in a neighbouring village and remembers a very different Keshopur-Miani. The land was swamp-like for as far as you could travel — khudd, he calls it — and dense with tall grass that people had to wade through to get to the other side. Mahsif often took a boat to collect grass as fodder for cattle. “Once a girl walked in and was found only two days later on the other end,” he says. “Bhoolbhulaiyya! It was a maze!”

Water levels would rise during the monsoon, but even when they receded in the winter, Keshopur remained marshy. When the cold set in, birds arrived, in lakhs, he said.

Today, he works as a labourer, picking lotus roots in the same swamps he once viewed as a child with wonder and a healthy dose of caution. It is hard work. The peak season coincides with the arrival of birds. When thousands of birds show up, their droppings make his arms itch no matter how much oil he applies before he gets into the water. But the hard labour pays his bills and keeps his home running.

India’s First Community Reserve

The Keshopur-Miani Community Reserve, in North Punjab’s Gurdaspur district, is India’s first-ever community reserve. The 800-acre mosaic of marshes, ponds and swamps hosts several thousand migratory and resident birds. During the winters, at least 15,000-20,000 migratory birds show up to feed and frolic in its waters. The marshy landscape is also the last bastion of the resident sarus crane and migratory common crane in the state — two of five species of crane seen in India.

The Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972 has been a game-changer for conservation in India. Before the Act, India had only five designated national parks, and hunting wild animals, including tigers, was permitted. Now, India has over 100 national parks. Conservationists awaited the Act’s amendment in 2002. The amendment included a new category of “community reserves” where locals could retain legal rights over certain protected landscapes, especially the ones that shared a deep connection with, while the forest department would step in to protect the habitat’s biodiversity. Forest officials and a few activists from Gurdaspur sprung into action. The region was losing its wetlands at a rapid pace. Keshopur had to be saved. Through several interventions, campaigns, and reassurances, locals were convinced to come on board to turn the wetlands of Keshopur-Miani into a reserve. In 2007, Punjab’s Keshopur-Miani wetland was the first to receive the tag of a community reserve in India. It came at a critical time for everyone, the wetlands, its birds, and the state. 

Symbiosis of Rivers and Wetlands

The Keshopur-Miani wetland lies in the Bari Doab, the “tongue” or the tract of floodplains between the Beas and Ravi rivers. (The word doab comes from the same Persian roots as Punjab. “Do” means two, like “punj” means five, while “ab” means water). The Punjab Gazetteer, published in 1914, remarks that the key characteristic of the Bari Doab was the number of swamps, locally called “chambs”, that dotted the landscape. They were so vast and rich in bird diversity that local rulers used them as hunting grounds to shoot birds. 

Today, wetlands across the Bari Doab have shrunk or been deliberately drained to make way for agricultural or other development projects. Historically, the Keshopur-Miani wetlands were once spread over a few thousand acres right up to the edges of the Ravi River. Today, it covers just over 800 acres, is hemmed by a road and farms on all sides, and lies disconnected from the Ravi, its mother river.

Wetlands, not Wastelands

While rivers are veins of a landscape, wetlands are its kidneys — rivers carry water and build riparian ecosystems, while wetlands filter pollutants and sediments. “They are reflections of each other,” says Ritesh Kumar, director of Wetlands International South Asia. But unlike Punjab’s rivers that have inspired poets and authors, these “kidneys” — mysterious and murky — have inspired little folklore. Like most wetlands across India and the world, Punjab’s wetlands have been viewed as wastelands waiting to be claimed. In the 1950s, when India was battling a severe food crisis after Independence, the Punjab government initiated the Grow More Food campaign to bring more land under cultivation. Funded by local government bodies, wetlands were drained to make room for farms. In the 1970s, the Green Revolution further hastened this process. The march to claim wetlands has intensified with the onslaught of urbanisation. By some estimates, India has lost one-third of its wetlands in just the last three decades. The loss of most natural wetlands in Punjab hasn’t even been documented; most have died unceremoniously. The paper “Lost Natural Wetlands of Punjab: An Inventory”, published in the Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing (2012), notes that the Beas floodplains had nine large natural wetlands. In the last three decades, most have been drained and turned into agricultural land or used to build settlements. “The remaining natural marshes in the area are also disappearing. Important wetlands like Shalapattan and Kahnuwan are shrinking in size every year,” says Gitanjali Kanwar, a senior coordinator at WWF-India.

Amidst the rapid onslaught on wetlands, Keshopur-Miani survives. In 2007, the forest department brokered a successful deal with the locals. Under the new amendment, Keshopur-Miani was declared a community reserve, and the villages would legally own the marsh. They would be free to earn a livelihood from it, but the forest department would protect its wild residents.

Today, five village panchayats surrounding it legally own this dynamic freshwater ecosystem. The villagers of Miani, Dalla, Keshopur, Matwa, and Magarmudian are free to use it. At one end, farmers like Mahsif harvest chestnuts and lotuses, while on the other, clear water ponds are used for aquaculture or fish farming. The wetland ecosystem is responsible for maintaining the water table in these areas. Unlike large regions of Punjab starved of groundwater, no deep bore wells are required for irrigation in these parts.

Haven for migratory birds

Punjab lies on the Central Asia Flyway, one of nine routes migratory birds take to travel from Central and Southern Europe, Central Asia and Siberia, and spend their winters in India. Many cover thousands of kilometres, flying through hostile habitats on little food or water. Gadwalls fly in large flocks from Central Asia. Bar-headed geese fly over the Himalayas, braving subzero temperatures. Punjab’s network of marshes, lakes, rivers, and reservoirs provide one of the first few stopovers for several thousand migratory birds that make this arduous journey.

During winter, the Keshopur-Miani Community Reserve hosts about 50-odd species of migratory birds. “While the villagers farm their crops here, we ensure they do not use pesticides or try to shoot the birds,” says Sukhdev, forest block officer. “Every migratory season, we see anywhere between 15,000-20,000 birds in this wetland.”

Today, the Keshopur-Miani wetlands are nothing like Mahsif remembers from his youth. They are not wild, dense, or mysterious. At least 80 per cent of the wetland is under year-round use for farming, grazing, aquaculture, and other human activities. Pressures from developers and locals to drain the wetlands persist. Despite these challenges, Keshopur-Miani continues to hold space firmly. In 2020, the wetland was declared a Ramsar site, a wetland of international importance and a reminder of the rich biodiversity and importance of the ecosystem. “In a time when we are losing wetlands rapidly, we must do everything to hold on to Keshopur. It is a rare patch of hope in a sea of despair,” says Kumar.