India's Ramsar wetlands now 103

This note is NP NOW. The stamp is verified. The Ramsar Convention Secretariat, the Press Information Bureau note from the environment ministry, The Indian Express and DD News were checked at about 9:00 am IST on 18 October 2026. The reel was posted at 11:25 am IST the same day. The announcement itself is dated 15 October.

India's list of Ramsar wetlands is now 103. The two additions are Sukhna Wetland in Chandigarh, Ramsar Site 2602, and Sauj Jheel in Uttar Pradesh, Site 2603. The Secretariat has published both listings. The PIB release says Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav announced them on 15 October 2026. DD News reports the same tally, and says the announcement was on Thursday 15 October. The Indian Express reports the Sukhna listing as well.

A Ramsar site, in the caption's definition, is a wetland treated as a Wetland of International Importance under the Ramsar Convention, the international treaty of 1971. The Indian Express says India has been a party to that treaty since 1 February 1982.

Sukhna, in The Indian Express, is about 565 acres. The caption places it in the foothills of the Shivaliks. The Secretariat describes it as an important stop for migratory birds on the Central Asian Flyway, and names the common pochard, Pallas's fish eagle and the black pond turtle among the species found there.

Sauj Jheel, in the Secretariat's account and in the caption, is a shallow lake in the Ganga floodplain, near the Saman Bird Sanctuary. The Secretariat numbers Saman as site 2413. It says more than 30,000 waterbirds come regularly, and that the sarus crane is among them.

The caption's line on why the tag matters is that wetlands regulate the flow of water and give birds, fish and other wildlife a home, and that a Ramsar tag puts international attention on conservation, including the catchment, water quality and habitat. That framing is the caption's. The species, the flyway, the acreage and the tally are in the sources above.

The pictures need a separate credit, because not all of them were made at the two sites. The video is file footage from 2016 by Info-farmer, on Wikimedia Commons, under CC0. The stills of the lake are also Commons photographs under CC BY-SA 4.0: sunrise over Sukhna by Unpetitprole, 10 June 2020; the Shivalik hills from Sukhna Lake by UnpetitproleX, 31 May 2026; and Sukhna Lake in the evening by Navneet Sharma, 4 October 2020. The common pochard and the sarus crane are photographs by Charles J. Sharp, also CC BY-SA 4.0. Those bird photographs were not taken at Sukhna or at Sauj, and the reel labels them that way. Sauj itself is shown as an NP map card. It is schematic, not to scale. The package notes that no Commons photograph of Sauj Jheel or of Saman was found. The music is Metriko, "Somber Constellations Ambient", from Pixabay.

What was added on 15 October is two named wetlands and a tally of 103. What the bird pictures are not is photographs from those wetlands.