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An average urban Indian, while passing through the outskirts of Karnataka or Andhra Pradesh, often would not register a landscape looking like the one above. It’s too dry, tree-less and rocky to conform to our perception of what a natural habitat should look like. It may have had trees which were cut down, one would imagine. If asked to list important natural regions, most Indians would mention the dense forests of Western Ghats, the undulating mountains of the Himalayas, the scenic coastline, sandy deserts or the central Indian tiger forests. Even the heavily-manicured tea and coffee plantations might appear as more ‘natural’ in the imaginations of people compared to these droughty and apparent ‘lifeless’ lands.

The Deccan, comprising swathes of such dry and sparsely wooded areas, is a place which has continued to remain on the margins of public imagination of what a natural and healthy ecosystem looks like. One must argue, why? The answer lies in India’s ecological history, our inherent ecological intuition, a forest-centric conservation governance and a cognitive bias towards the visible aboveground store of carbon in natural ecosystems. However, a growing body of literature suggests that India, like other tropical countries, has housed these arid and semi-arid ecosystems for millenia, and they are as ‘natural’ as any ecosystem in the subcontinent.

Living landscapes of the Deccan

Deccan Peninsula, a prehistoric plateau formed around 66 million years ago, forms a considerable portion of peninsular India. It is bounded by Satpura and Vindhya ranges in the north and Western and Eastern Ghats on the west and east, respectively, and stretches across multiple states of the country. Most parts of the plateau were historically under arid and semi-arid open canopy ecosystems, now known as Open Natural Ecosystems (ONEs), and have supported wildlife and human-livelihoods alike for centuries.

Vast stretches of the Deccan remain arid brown for most part of the year and dramatically change appearance during the rainy season. With the onset of monsoon, newer leaves flush in the dry-adapted trees of the region and the ground becomes lush green as the grasses and forbs resprout. These dynamic and naturally-occurring open ecosystems serve as habitats of many globally threatened or charismatic species such as Great Indian bustard, Indian wolf, Striped hyena, Blackbuck and Sloth bear, while supporting a large human population and socio-economically critical livelihoods.

The arid agro-pastoral lands of the Deccan Peninsula are home to charismatic and threatened large wildlife, such as Blackbuck. Photo: Indrajeet Ghorpade

A key feature of the Deccan landscape is its role in supporting large numbers of seasonally migrating livestock and pastoralists, reliant largely on ONEs and agricultural farms. It supports one of the highest densities of livestock in the country, providing animal-based nutrition to millions of people for centuries. These shared landscapes take many forms of natural and anthropogenic vistas: rocky outcrops, thorny savannas, arid grasslands, black cotton soil plains and even monsoonal agricultural lands. The seasonal movement of pastoralists and their livestock through the outcrops and savannas creates spatial and temporal refuges for certain wildlife, whereas the monsoonal agricultural lands create habitats for other species groups. Considerable parts of these shared landscapes are private uncultivated farmlands, while the rest are public lands, primarily under reserve forests and village commons. As a result, a large section of these shared landscapes neither falls under the jurisdiction of forest bureaucracy nor is governed specifically for pastoral livelihoods. Rather, misinformed knowledge of the socio-ecological importance of these landscapes has led to a focus on producing new value through afforestation, irrigation and renewable energy generation by state and non-state actors. Such value production, although somewhat essential for human well-being, has inevitably led to large-scale land conversion and tenurial changes in the ONEs of the Deccan, leading to widespread decline in their contiguity. Recent studies suggest that 94% of the ONEs in India are between 1–100 ha in size, with most of the large ONEs being outside the Deccan. The Deccan is now made up of small islands of ONEs embedded within areas under agriculture, industries and urban spaces, manoeuvering through which is probably as difficult for the native wildlife as for pastoralists.

The Open Natural Ecosystems of the Deccan Peninsula, besides supporting native biodiversity, also supports one of the highest densities of livestock in the country and has been providing livelihood to generations of pastoralists over the last few centuries. Photo: Iravatee Majgaonkar

Ghost of the colonial past

Similar to most countries in the global south, conservation practice in India largely revolves around two colonial discourses: a protectionist paradigm of wildlife conservation in fragmented habitat patches and a forest-centric worldview of habitat management. The former dictates that endangered wildlife have to be conserved by protecting areas of ‘pristine’ landscapes, irrespective of the larger land-use matrix they are embedded in. The latter originates as a result of the British colonial legacy, wherein personnel trained in European forestry techniques viewed landscapes with any degree of vegetation cover as forest and devised management plans to manage them as sources of timber. Such archetypes of conservation planning have historically rendered most of the Deccan ill-suited for conservation, leaving swathes of these natural landscapes available for land-use conversion. Despite eight-decades of India’s independence, the current land governance and conservation policy is still largely dictated by colonial ideals. While ‘pristine’ and ‘natural’ forests across the country continue to be designated as ecologically important areas, the supposed ‘degraded forests’ and ‘marginal lands’ of the Deccan are thought of as a ‘land bank’ and remain earmarked for initiatives aimed to meet the agricultural, economic and climate aspirations of a developing economy.

Echoes of a withering landscape 

Expansive land conversion has had irreversible consequences on both wildlife and people of the Deccan. Loss of native ecosystems — both in terms of their quality and expanse, have not only led to a decline in the habitat of globally threatened animals, but also sometimes made way for species such as the Indian leopard which can readily adapt to agricultural and peri-urban systems. Such widespread alteration of habitat characteristics and species assemblage is likely to have cascading consequences on the ecological future of the landscape — knowledge of which is lacking owing to a long-standing neglect of conservation research and practice in the Deccan.

The arid and semi-arid landscapes of the Deccan are increasingly being earmarked to make way for afforestation, wind and solar energy, as part of India’s green energy initiatives. Photo: Anish Paul

Furthermore, there has also been widespread disruption in pastoral practices across the Deccan. Pervasive land-use conversion of open-canopy lands is disrupting the viability and stability of pastoral livelihoods. Movement across vast geographies, dictated by seasonal resource availability and socio-economic arrangements, is an inherent feature of nomadic pastoralism. However, with areas under pastoral lands being diminished drastically, pastoralist movement is becoming untenable in many regions, and the use of remnant patches of ONEs are becoming more frequent than before. This, on one hand, can increase the chances of overgrazing, and on the other, can heighten the chances of pastoralist-wildlife encounters since ONEs provide refuge to native wildlife. Plummeting dependable natural resources, coupled with historical marginalisation, lack of state support and hindering access to grazing lands is compromising the resilience of pastoralism in the Deccan.

Rocky outcrops and inselbergs, a characteristic landscape feature of the Deccan Peninsula, acts as natural refugia to globally threatened large wildlife, such as Indian wolf, Striped hyena and Sloth bear. Photo: Dheeraj Aithal

Rethinking conservation in the Deccan

How can we then imagine conservation governance in landscapes like the Deccan given that a considerable part of the ONEs are highly fragmented, under private agricultural tenure, and support pastoralist livelihoods? At the very least, we should not rely on fortress conservation models and realise that ONEs are always going to provide ecological security to pastoralists and native habitats for wildlife together (‘together’ being the key word). Their management will have to be ecologically informed and socially just at the same time. Those ONEs under the forest department have to be managed with a dual purpose – conservation of wildlife and provisioning livelihood security for pastoralists. Community-managed livestock grazing itineraries in ONEs, which are supported by strong monetary and social incentives for communities involved in the management, need to become commonplace.

Currently, few isolated pockets in the Deccan have implemented such models (Kalpavalli Community Conserved Area in Ananthpur district of Andhra Pradesh, Kiraksal Conservation Project in Satara district of Maharashtra and Samvedana’s community led grassland conservation project in Vidharba, Maharashtra to name a few) and these can serve as guiding lights for others. Those ONEs which are under village commons, and have either seen land grabs for developmental projects and afforestation or have seen habitat degradation, need to be reclaimed by panchayats and managed for pastoralism. ONEs in the form of uncultivated agricultural lands need to be recognised as habitats for wildlife and as a source of fodder for pastoralist livestock.

To incentivise their continued use for pastoralism and wildlife habitats, farmer-pastoralist economies need to be valued and strengthened through mechanisms like carbon credits. Keeping privately owned ONEs uncultivated needs to be recognised as a sustainable form of land management and rewarded with social and financial benefits, thereby valuing their contributions to the livestock economy and habitat conservation. Hence, one of the promising pathways to ensuring ONEs persist as wildlife habitats in the Deccan is through their management for pastoralism. In the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists (2026), strong evidence is coming forward for linkages between the goals of biodiversity conservation and pastoralism throughout the globe. The ONEs of the Deccan offer an opportunity to utilise this learning and work towards conserving the resilient yet fragile socioecological system encompassing habitats, wildlife, livestock and pastoralists in the ever-changing world of Anthropocene.

Iravatee is a PhD student at ATREE, Bengaluru, and works on human-wildlife coexistence and pastoralism in the Deccan.

Anish Paul is a researcher at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He studies biogeochemistry, animal behaviour and ecosystems ecology across terrestrial and marine ecosystems.

This is the tenth article in a series exploring the challenges faced by Indian pastoralists. Read the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth. 

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