Kabar Lake, the state’s largest freshwater wetland ecosystem, is shrinking each year, while funds for its conservation continue to rot for the past two decades.

Ashok Ghosh, the professor in-charge of the department of environment and water management, AN College, conducted a study at Kabar Lake in March this year. The studies revealed that the lake has reduced by 66 per cent since 2004 and only 30 per cent of the original coverage area, as recorded in 1984, is left.

Ghosh told The Telegraph: “Kabar Tal (wetland) has been shrinking at an abnormally high rate, as revealed by a comparison of remote-sensing pictures taken in 1984 and 2004, and 2012 in the dry month of March by my research group. The lake covered 6,786.05 hectares in 1984, which reduced to 6,043.825 hectares by 2004. Our study in March 2012 revealed that the lake’s area has been reduced to only 2,032.23 hectares.

“Whatever area is left, the depth of water in the Kabar Lake is only a few metres converting it into marsh land. Weeds have spread across the marshy wetland, leading to the loss of lake’s natural biodiversity,” he added.

The acute reduction of the lake comes at a time when funds of Rs 31,36,000 from the National Wetland Conservation Programme, ministry of environment and forest, for the lake is lying unutilised in the state’s treasury since 1992. In two decades, the environment and forest department has been unable to prepare a work plan to utilise the funds.

“The central government funds for the conservation purpose of Kabar Lake are in the state’s treasury since 1992 because we do not have any work plan. Now we are working to prepare a work plan with support from World Bank. We are going to start a study soon to prepare the work plan and the utilisation of funds would start once it is ready,” said B.A. Khan, principal chief conservator of forest, Bihar.

Ornithologist and state co-coordinator of Wetlands International and member of the state wildlife board, Arvind Mishra, said: “The ecosystem of wetlands is very fragile, sensitive and probably irrecoverable. The degradation of the ecosystem at Kabar Lake is alarming. The situation is so severe that the population of birds at the wetland reduced from several lakhs in the 1970s to around 20,000 in the 1990s. Now, the number has come down to around 5,000.”

A team of delegates from the environment and forest department, Rajendra Agriculture University, Pusa in Samastipur, and Zoological Survey of India, Patna, among others visited the lake in February 2011. Mishra said: “Almost 99 per cent of the lake area, spread over 6,311 hectares, was completely dry that too in the winter. The residents claimed they had never seen the lake in such a condition during the peak winter season.”