Imagine a form of livelihood that requires no factories, no irrigation, and no massive infrastructure. It contributes to food security, biodiversity, renewable economies and even climate resilience. It’s deeply ecological, quietly productive, and astonishingly widespread. Now imagine it being ignored for over a century. Across India, close to 10-12 million people and their animals traverse mountains, plains, and deserts, doing what they’ve done for generations – moving with the rhythms of the seasons in search of grass, water, and opportunities to market their goods. These are pastoralists – managers of one of India’s most misunderstood livelihood system and keepers of over 40% of the country’s livestock genetic diversity. And yet, for all their contributions, both they and the grazing lands they depend on remain invisible in national policy making and discourse.Misunderstanding pastoralism and grasslandsTo be fair, pastoralism can feel like a bit of a mystery. The whole business of people and livestock moving around, refusing to settle down into neat categories , does not sit easily with our understanding of “modern” production systems. Pastoralism ought to have made way for agriculture and then closed shop. Is evolutionary logic appropriate to assess whether pastoralism survives or not? But regardless of whether it survives, we pretend it doesn’t exist. Neither pastoralists nor the rangelands where they graze their animals are quantified, understood or even properly enumerated. As for rangelands, they are most often labelled as “wastelands” – a term that suggests not only neglect but a policy green light for takeover by industry, agriculture, or, more recently carbon-sequestering tree plantations. All this, despite the fact that these ecosystems are home to some of India’s rarest biodiversity and form the ecological backbone of our dryland ecosystems.The roots of this problem go deep. Colonial-era foresters, trained in the temperate woods of Europe, looked out at India’s scrublands and savannas and saw absence — of trees, of timber and of the potential for revenue. In came the plantations and out went the herders. The British administrative mindset, with its love of neat borders and settled cultivation, was flummoxed by pastoral mobility, which seemed outdated, inefficient and unproductive. Never mind that pastoralists had evolved precisely the kind of adaptive, mobile systems that one would now call climate-adaptive. Their centuries-old knowledge of landscapes, forage and weather patterns was dismissed as backward.The irony is that these systems, derided for their unpredictability, are now being hailed, at least by researchers and civil society organisations, as ‘models of resilience’ in a world of climate chaos. Pastoral mobility, it turns out, is not a bug or a glitch but an integral feature of this extensive production system. It allows herders to track changes in weather and navigate across landscapes that fluctuate wildly in productivity. Where settled agriculture falters under erratic rainfall, pastoralists make do by being on the move. It’s not aimless wandering, it’s a finely calibrated migration.Despite this, pastoralists find themselves hemmed in on all sides. Common lands have shrunk and commercial crop agriculture has taken over. Forests have turned into conservation fortresses that shut out the people who once helped maintain them. And now, in the name of climate mitigation, one of our many pledges include greening 26 million hectares, much of which will likely come from open ecosystems wrongly assumed to be barren or “wastelands”. The prevailing logic seems to be: if it doesn’t have trees, plant some. But many of these grasslands are naturally treeless ecosystems. Introducing trees can not only damage these fragile ecologies but also displace the pastoralists who rely on them.Economies and ecology in plain sightAll this while, the pastoral economy continues to feed us, largely unrecognised and under-appreciated. By the estimates of our team of researchers at the Centre for Pastoralism, the annual value of just the sheep and goat economy in India is Rs 589 billion. Pastoralism, at large, could be valued closer to Rs 1,650 billion – more than India’s national education budget and nearly 3% of the agricultural GDP. This includes meat, milk, wool, pashmina, and dung (yes, dung!), all of which flow through informal value chains that rarely make it to NITI Aayog reports or Ministry of Agriculture briefings. It is an entire parallel economy, largely powered by people whose names we have not bothered to count.And let us not forget: this economy is green. Not the kind of green you can slap onto a carbon offset certificate, but the kind that comes from livelihoods that leave behind hoofprints instead of smokestacks. Pastoralists don’t burn diesel to grow grass. Their production system is dispersed, circular, and rooted in ecological flows of fodder availability. They graze, fertilise, and move on, leaving behind landscapes that, in many cases, are healthier for it.Indeed, a growing body of ecological research is challenging the old assumption that grazing equals degradation. Colleagues at the National Centre for Biological Sciences point out that, in many dryland systems, the primary driver of vegetation change is not grazing pressure but increasing climate-change induced rainfall variability. Grazing, in moderation, is necessary for maintaining grassland health. And yet, pastoralists are being pushed to settle, their mobility restricted, their access to land curtailed, and their future made increasingly precarious.So where does that leave us?Indian pastoralism is at an inflection point. The challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, and rural livelihoods are converging on the same landscapes. We can continue to treat grasslands as empty spaces waiting to be “developed,” or we can begin to recognise and quantify them and their relationship with pastoralism. This requires better data, certainly. But more importantly, it requires a shift in our imagination of the mainstream. We must stop asking how to replace pastoralism and start asking how to support it. That means recognising pastoralism’s contribution, investing in mobile veterinary services, supporting markets for their produce and most crucially, ensuring secure access to grazing lands. It means understanding that mobility is not a problem to be solved but a solution to be embraced. And it means acknowledging that not all forms of land use have to be permanent, fenced and monetised in conventional ways. There are signs of possibility. Some states like Himachal Pradesh and Karnataka are beginning to revisit grazing rights and the role of pastoralism in maintaining natural landscapes. National missions on biodiversity and climate and on sustainable agriculture now speak of inclusive and locally rooted solutions. This year is designated as the International Year for Rangelands and Pastoralism (IYRP). This global action offers an opportunity to reimagine our relationship with rangeland ecologies and the people who inhabit them. With dedicated attention, it could mark the beginning of a long-overdue shift in how we value mobility, protect open ecosystems, and make space for a way of life that has quietly sustained India’s rangelands for centuries.Aniruddh Sheth is the research coordinator at the Centre for Pastoralism, leading research on the political ecology of pastoralism.This is the first article in a series exploring the challenges faced by Indian pastoralism.