Habitat restoration is as critical as captive breeding for the long-term survival of endangered species — critically examine with reference to India's grassland ecosystems.

India's alluvial and terai grasslands, long dismissed in revenue records as "wasteland", shelter species found nowhere else. The pygmy hog (Porcula salvania) shows that conservation breeding can avert extinction, but that survival is finally decided by the condition of the grass.

The case for captive breeding

• The Pygmy Hog Conservation Programme (1995) — Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust with the Assam Forest Department and IUCN/SSC Wild Pig Specialist Group — built its stock from just six founders captured in 1996 [1].
• It has reintroduced about 130 hogs across four Assam protected areas while retaining a captive reserve population [1], and Assam credits it with a 32-fold population rise over three decades [2].
• Ex-situ stock is indispensable insurance: by the 1990s the species survived as a single wild population, which one flood, fire or swine-disease outbreak could erase.

Why habitat restoration is the binding constraint

• Invasives: Chromolaena odorata and Mikania micrantha occupy roughly 75 km² and 82 km² of Manas's 391 km², smothering native grass [3].
• Fire and grazing: indiscriminate dry-season burning for fresh fodder, plus livestock grazing, removes the tall-grass cover the hog nests in, leaving fragmented patches that expose it to predators [3]. Early, block-wise burning with fire-lines is the corrective, not a fire ban.
• Active restoration now targets 310 ha in the Rupahi–Kanchanbari corridor and 300 ha at Panbari, with manual invasive removal and canopy girdling [4].
• Policy: the MoEFCC Guide to Grasslands and Other Open Natural Ecosystems (UNCCD COP17, August 2026) warns that judging such lands by absence of trees invites plantations and diversion [5].

Critically, releases into unmanaged grassland amount to restocking rather than recovery; success at Orang, where grassland protocols followed release, proves the pairing works. Ex-situ breeding is a bridge, in-situ restoration the destination — and its umbrella benefits reach the Bengal florican, hispid hare and one-horned rhino. Recording grasslands as ecosystems rather than wasteland is the decisive first step.