Inside a Camel Herder’s Award-Winning Fight to Protect 10000 Hectares of Thar Grassland

Think back to a school geography class, flipping through an atlas. Rajasthan’s Thar was often a broad yellow patch on the map, a vast stretch of desert that seemed almost empty.

For Sumer Singh Bhati, that same land can decide something far more immediate: whether a camel finds enough to eat that day.

Bhati is a traditional camel herder from Jaisalmer. He knows the Degrai Mata Oran through its grasses, its ponds, its grazing routes and the animals that depend on them.

“You can say these grasses are like ghee and milk for camels, extremely paushtik (nutritious),” he says of the native Sewan and Dhaman grasses that grow here.

That simple relationship between grass, animal and herder sits at the heart of a much bigger fight.

The Degrai Mata Oran stretches across nearly 10,000 hectares. Around 5,000 pastoral families and more than 50,000 livestock animals depend on these grazing grounds. The same landscape provides a home for wildlife, including the critically endangered Great Indian Bustard.

Yet parts of this land have remained differently classified in official records, leaving them vulnerable to other forms of land use.

For years, Bhati has been trying to protect what those records can fail to capture. He has gone from village to village, helped bring nearly 20 communities into the effort, walked hundreds of kilometres to take their concerns beyond the desert, and spoken out about threats to the grasslands.

Along the way, native grasses have returned, traditional water bodies have been revived, and grazing grounds have begun to recover.

His work has now earned him a place among the global awardees of the Rangeland Awards 2026.

But the question driving Bhati has always been much closer to home: what happens to a herder when the land that feeds his animals begins to disappear?

How a childhood memory became a lifelong fight 

That concern has roots going back much further than the marches, petitions and awards.

One of Bhati’s earliest memories goes back to when he was about five years old. He recalls watching his father confront a group of men to save a chinkara. He was too young to fully understand what was happening, but the moment stayed with him.

Years later, the threat came closer to the land his own community depended on.

In 2004, only 5,817 hectares of the Deg Rai Mata Oran were registered in the name of the temple trust. Bhati has said that the partial registration raised concerns. Those concerns grew as solar and wind energy projects began digging across parts of the sacred land.

By 2018, Bhati and other community members had begun organising more formally, taking their message from village to village through awareness campaigns, marches and parikramas around threatened orans.

At the centre of everything they were trying to protect was something deceptively simple: grass.

The grasses that keep the Thar alive

Ask Bhati why this land matters, and his answer begins with grass.

“See, the grasses are very important here. Sewan and Dhaman grass. These are vital for the Indian bustard or camels,” he tells The Better India.

Sewan (Lasiurus sindicus) is native to the hyper-arid sandy plains and dunes of western Rajasthan. Its deep root system helps it survive long periods without rain, making it one of the grasses that has adapted to the Thar rather than being introduced into it. 

Then there is Dhaman (Cenchrus setigerus), another native grass of Rajasthan’s arid and semi-arid landscapes. It provides forage for livestock even when the summer heat has stripped much of the landscape of green cover.

For Bhati, these are everyday realities rather than conservation terminology. “These grasses pack a lot of nutrition for the camels,” Bhati says. “Now, because of the climate, this is reducing and degrading.” 

“We can’t let that happen. We humans depend on it too, because the fauna is there, the camel is there,” he adds. 

For someone whose life has been shaped by camels and the land they graze on, the connections are difficult to separate.

Protecting the grass also means protecting the animals and people that rely on it. That understanding has shaped Bhati’s approach to the Degrai Mata Oran.

Rather than trying to remake the desert, the community has worked with the landscape as it is. Community protection has allowed native vegetation to regenerate through natural processes. Seasonal water bodies have also been rejuvenated, giving livestock and wildlife access to water while supporting the grassland ecosystem.

An earlier profile of the Degrai Oran by the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists notes that the landscape covers about 10,000 hectares and that community efforts helped establish pastures and ponds while securing the ecological value of the land.

What exactly is an oran?

To understand why protecting Degrai has required a larger campaign, it helps to understand what an oran is. 

The word oran comes from aranya, meaning forest, and in Rajasthan it refers to community-conserved landscapes associated with local deities.

Some are only a few hectares. Others stretch across thousands.

Ecologically, they can function as silvi-pastoral landscapes, providing fodder and habitat while supporting native plants, wildlife and livestock. Their traditional water structures, including johads, talabs, nadis, beris and open wells, help communities and animals survive in a landscape where water is scarce.

The Degrai Mata Oran is one such landscape.

For generations, its grasslands have supported pastoral communities and their animals. The challenge, however, is that the value people see on the ground does not always match the way the land appears in official records. 

In 2022, Bhati told Down To Earth that while the Degrai Oran stretched across around 10,000 hectares, only about 4,000 hectares were recognised as oran land in revenue records. The rest was categorised as wasteland, leaving it vulnerable to allotment for other uses.

A grassland may look like open space on a map, but for the people living around it, it can mean grazing land, water, fodder and survival. For wildlife, it is habitat.

Bhati knew that protecting the oran would need the people who depended on it to stand up for it together. So he started with the villages around him.

Taking the fight from village to village

He began going door to door, speaking to people about what was changing in the grasslands and why it mattered.

He went from door to door speaking to villagers about how the grasslands were changing and what could be done to protect them.

“I go from door to door, telling villagers not to use pesticides,” he says. “In western Rajasthan, use natural, indigenous things like cow dung and organic insecticides.” 

These conversations brought conservation into the decisions people were making in their own fields and villages. Nearly 20 villages came together around the protection of the orans.

Soon, though, Bhati felt the concerns of these villages needed to travel much further.

Why he walked 700 km for the grasslands 

Bhati’s most visible campaign was the Oran Bachao Padyatra, an 85-day foot march of roughly 700 km from the Tanot Mata temple in Jaisalmer district to Jaipur. It began on 21 January 2026 and reached the state capital on 16 April, with more than 100 farmers and livestock rearers taking part. 

The choice of walking was deliberate.

“When the movement started, our main motto was to tell people, ‘Gaon bachega toh sheher bachega’ (if villages survive, so will the towns),” he says. “And we never accused any political parties. Our approach was Gandhian. I was very strict about it.”

Walking gave Bhati and others in the campaign a way to carry a concern rooted in the desert all the way to the state capital.

“Since it was a Gandhi-tarika, a Gandhian way of taking the movement forward, we chose a padyatra, a foot march, for our grasslands, our animals and our pashu dhan (livestock wealth),” Bhati says. 

The protest also led to approximately 3,800 hectares of land being officially entered into government records. 

Along the way, the campaign also began drawing attention to the pressures these grasslands face from large infrastructure projects, including renewable-energy development across parts of western Rajasthan.

“There are solar projects, wind projects being sanctioned and carried on in our grasslands,” he says. “This is detrimental, so we’re trying to make everyone understand.”

The movement’s concerns then reached the Supreme Court. In April 2026, an intervention application seeking constitutional protection for orans and related commons such as gochars and agors was taken on record by the Court. 

For him, the issue is about ensuring that the ecological and pastoral value of these landscapes is recognised before decisions about their future are made.

What happens when a camel loses its grazing ground? 

For Bhati, protecting the oran and protecting the camel are part of the same work.

Camels have long shaped life in the Thar. They feed on grasses and thorny vegetation, while their movement across grazing lands and their dung help disperse seeds and return nutrients to the soil. For pastoral communities, they have supported livelihoods for generations.

Bhati has spent years working on camel conservation and livelihood issues, so he sees these connections up close. The camel needs the grassland for food. The pastoralist depends on the camel. And both depend on a landscape where grass, water, livestock and people support one another.

When grazing grounds shrink, that balance begins to fray, threatening a way of life built over generations.

The same grasslands are also home to wildlife. The Degrai landscape supports the critically endangered Great Indian Bustard, whose survival depends in part on Rajasthan’s remaining open grasslands.

Bhati has campaigned against overhead power lines after birds were killed in collisions with them. In 2020, he reported the death of a Great Indian Bustard near the Degrai Mata Oran after it collided with newly installed high-tension power lines. That loss drew him further into the fight to protect the wider landscape.

His efforts have also contributed to the documentation of the Asiatic Caracal, another species found in Rajasthan’s dry landscapes.

For Bhati, it all comes back to the same land. The grass that feeds a camel can shelter a bird. A pond used by livestock can sustain wildlife. And a grazing ground supporting a pastoral family can hold together an entire living system.

The International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists, declared for 2026, is intended to draw attention to this connection.

In Degrai, Bhati has lived it first-hand. His knowledge comes from being a camel herder, watching the land closely, and seeing what happens when one part of that system comes under pressure. His response has been to bring together the people who know the landscape just as intimately, and ask that the rest of us learn to see what they see.

Picture Source: Sumer Singh Bhati

Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: thebetterindia.com