Showing posts with label Forests. Show all posts

Thursday, May 24, 2018

A different purple - in the hills of Yercaud

April 2018

The hills were alive
with the colours of the Crepe Myrtle.
Pride of India.

Lagerstroemia

Thursday, March 15, 2018

Lalchandji and the tigers

Sounds like something out of a Ruskin Bond book.

I looked up the terrain on Google Maps, and it is just as Raza Kazmi describes it - Pilibhit is a thin horse-shoe-shaped strip of Terai forest bound by tall sugarcane fields on all sides except for the slender forest corridors connecting it to the Shivalik forests of Uttarakhand to its west, Shuklaphanta national park (in Nepal) to its north and Dudhwa tiger reserve to its east.

The Tiger in my Backyard

The lonely life of a forest bungalow guard in UP’s Pilibhit tiger reserve.

Written by Raza Kazmi | Published: January 21, 2018 12:05 am

“Just as dusk begins giving way to the night, I bolt myself inside the rest house. I have my dinner there and stay locked till daybreak. If someone arrives at the main gate at night, he opens the gate himself, I don’t go out. Tigers and leopards regularly enter the compound and there is just one solar light near the kitchen that works. Everything else is engulfed in darkness. Just a few days ago, two tigers came inside the campus and roared for a good two hours while I was holed inside this godforsaken bungalow all alone, waiting for dawn,” says Lalchandji, the chowkidaar at the Mala forest rest house in Uttar Pradesh’s little-known Pilibhit tiger reserve, as he rakes up the dying embers of the small fire we had lit to shield ourselves from the cold.
His caution isn’t without reason. There is a palpable fear among forest staff and locals all across this tiger reserve that has witnessed, perhaps, the worst spate of tiger attacks in India in recent history. More than 20 people have been killed by the striped cats over the past few months, more than one-third of the fatalities being in a 5 km radius of the Mala bungalow. The conflict is primarily fuelled by the unique geography of this tiger reserve. Pilibhit is a thin horse-shoe-shaped strip of Terai forest bound by tall sugarcane fields on all sides except for the slender forest corridors connecting it to the Shivalik forests of Uttarakhand to its west, Shuklaphanta national park (in Nepal) to its north and Dudhwa tiger reserve to its east. The tall sugarcane provides good cover to the big cats as well as their prey, and, consequently, tigers regularly move about in these fields. Villagers must enter as well to tend to their fields and so the stage for tragedy is set. The forest department asks residents to avoid moving about in and around the forest after dark, and to move in large groups if they must.

Lalchandji, however, has no such safety net to fall back on. The ageing veteran stands guard all alone at the bungalow — except for occasional short visits during the day by fellow staff members — because, as he nonchalantly puts it, “Who else will take care of it if not me?” He isn’t a chowkidaar by designation, though. “I am an ardali [orderly]. I got regularised after working nearly three decades on daily wage. I got posted as an ad-hoc chowkidaar here 15 years ago when the last guy died. They have forgotten me here since,” he says with a shrug.
He would have made his peace with this life, but for the the “damn tigers and leopards”. “They won’t leave me in peace even during the day, sometimes. Just a few months ago, three large tigers walked into this fallow field in broad daylight,” he says, pointing towards a small field, barely 15 feet behind me, that was seasonally used to raise nursery crops. “There I was taking a nice bath in the sun when suddenly there were a few peacock calls. The next thing I know, three full grown tigers suddenly walk out of the forest, casually jump over the barbed wire fence and lie down in this field.” His tone betrays a rare hint of excitement. “I was so flustered I couldn’t even get my clothes on! I ran half-naked into the kitchen and bolted the doors. And don’t even get me started on that rascal leopard who climbed up the roof of my quarter!” he scoffs. I try not to laugh at this amusing tirade, but it’s a difficult task: he speaks of them like a grumpy old man expressing his annoyance at street urchins. “They make my life miserable,” he complains, before lapsing into silence. “But, at least, they give me company on lonely days,” he says.
The deer are a big draw for predators in the area. (Photo: Raza Kazmi)Just as he is finishing his story, his phone rings. He squints his eyes, takes out his ancient phone, and then presses the reject button. “Ye ek aur narak bana rakha hai jeevan ko is saale phone ne.” (This damn phone is another object that is making my life hell), he groans. “People from home keep calling, asking me to come for festivals and functions. I have just had three holidays in the last one year. I even spent Diwali alone here. In the silence of the night, I could hear the faint sounds of celebration from Mala village,” he says, his voice plaintive. “This damn phone rang just then, a call from home. I rejected the call…stupid mobile phones,” he mutters.
I ask him why he doesn’t press for leaves. After all, his home is only about 6 km away and his health has steadily declined over the past two years. “Didn’t I tell you already? Who will take care of this place then?” he says and lapses into silence. “But it is going to be over soon. I will be retiring in two months’ time. Then, I will rest for as long as I want. I have some land, maybe I will start farming again,” he says, as a flock of oriental pied hornbills settle on a fig tree for the night.
The glowing red embers of the fire have begun dying. We retire for the night. The next morning, I find him restlessly pacing around the fire he has lit close to the kitchen. I greet him and he lets out a broad smile. “You are sleeping easy here. A leopard walked right past your head in the night!” he says, showing me fresh pugmarks next to the bungalow’s verandah. “Stupid leopard,” he chuckles.

Raza Kazmi is a Jharkhand-based conservationist and a keen student of India’s wildlife history.

Monday, March 5, 2018

The magnificent Rutland Island that needs to be 'saved' from a defence project

16th April 2017

Continued from here.

The MNS group was visiting the Andaman islands and staying at ANET in Wandoor. Through the efforts of Mr Shankarnarayan, we had obtained permission to visit Rutland Island!

We set out, if I remember right at around 6am in the morning. The sun was up, and we travelled in our van along the thinly populated areas, going east first and then south, hugging the coast of the main island.

There was a little hamlet called Manjery, which amused and delighted me, as there is a Manjeri in Kerala that's famous in the family, but I am digressing. After about 45 minutes, through the tree cover, we spied the waters, and what a lovely sight it was!

We were at Pongibalu jetty, from where we were to take an open motorboat to Rutland.

The pictures below do not do justice to the natural beauty we saw. Clear waters, colourful fish darting in schools, mangroves at the edge, blue skies and a lovely breeze to counter the sharp April sun.

We were lucky to have with us Manish and Sathya from ANET, along with the forest department guide, to take us through what we saw and experienced.

The views from Pongibalu, to the north

South and west, with Rutland Island in the distance.

Once again, the literally earth-shaking events of the tsunami were in evidence. On the right is the old jetty which has subsided and gone under water. (Click on the picture to get a better look) Rutland island has continuous freshwater, and that is the pipe that brings it to the main island.

Two boat trips were needed to ferry us across, and as we waited for our ride, we watched the fishes dart in and out from under the jetty platform, glinting as they caught the sun at certain angles. There were a lot of garfish or sea needles, and their long needle-shaped snouts made them easy to spot.

Then there were schools of parrotfish! What colours! Hard as I tried, I could not manage a picture of them, so fast were they in darting in and out.

The boat returned and we set off.

Rifleman island?

We crossed a tiny island called Rifleman, and rounded the Diligence Straits before we saw the jetty on Rutland Island. We were going to the one inside the cove, not the more exposed one further east.

Looking out from Rutland Island at the jetty

As we moved in, off the beach we learned that there are no original inhabitants (Jangil tribe) anymore, and there is one small village of settlers, but otherwise the island is basically uninhabited, with no roads as such.

That is all set to change as there is an approved plan to set up some defence installations and missile testing. Really? Seriously? Isn't there any other place they could use? Any other island?

We stayed on the trail and there were TALL garjan trees (Dipterocarpus alatus or are they turbinatus?) that we
had to crane our necks to see. Magnificent, thats the only word that came to my mind.
I of course had to see every tall tree, and therefore made very slow progress! The seeds are
what we used to call "helicopters" as kids, twirling down with gravity. The tree is in the

"Critically Endangered" list of IUCN, one more reason to leave this island alone.

Most of the Andaman archipelago depend on rainwater for fresh water. However Rutland Island has freshwater streams running through it, and from one such stream, a huge pipe carries water to the main south Andaman island, as was seen in the picture of the jetty.

Our Forest Guide can be seen standing on on one of the chambers along the pipe way.

He explained to us how the forests of the island were dense and covered with cane, bamboo and lianas and creepers, along with the forest giants, and the mixed forest is healthy and vibrant.

The giant evergreens, were just that.

There are many Dipterocarps it seems!

Another Dipteorcarpus variety (I think), this one in seed.

The rattan canes (Calamus longisetus) were everywhere. Manish showed us the 'hooks' that these climbers have by which they successfully climb over everything!

The sun was high in the sky, and the air was humid. We were all sweating profusely, even though our path was more or less in the shade of the large trees.

The tree species would require several weeks of visits for me to note and identify properly. There were endemics like Planchonia andamanicus, Padauk - we saw a large fallen tree, Andaman crepe myrtle - Lagerstroemia hypoleuca, besides Siris, Junglee badam and other familiar trees.

The Evergreen Giants

The overgrowth

Shades of Green

Emerald Gecko!

We found a bus-stop like rain shelter and all crowded into it, to sit and cool off, when Shubha spotted this brilliant green critter on the tree in front. Phelsuma Andamanesis (Andaman Island Day Gecko) is found only in the Andamans, and we were privileged to spot it. (Photo by Ramesh) Click on the picture to see the beautiful colourations in detail.

It moved in and out of view as it circled the bark in search of its lunch of insects.

We moved off the trail and settled by a little freshwater pond, where Pritam decided that the only way to cool off was to get right in. So he strode in, and settled in the middle of the shallow pond, (with a surly look on his face which discouraged any smart comments), with only his hat-covered head out of water. He did emerge in a little while in a better frame of mind it has to be said!

His mood improved even more when he spotted the Andaman Bulbul and Coucal in the foliage by the pond. There were orioles too. Watersides always lead to good bird sightings.

After a picnic lunch, we turned back on the trail to return to the jetty. I think the plan was to traverse the entire length of the island, but given the speed of our progress we made it only half way!

I don't think we quite know all the floral and faunal treasures that Rutland Island holds and yet the GOI wants to come in with this defence project. Call me naive, a bleeding heart, anti-development or whatever, but this whole project makes no sense to me.

If we could move the neutrino project out of the Western Ghats, why not this as well?

Terns awaited our return at Pongibalu.

That evening, we strolled back to the Wandoor beach, via the Lohabarrack Sanctuary entrance. The waters are enclosed by a kind of net, and as the sun goes down, the local police are out with their whistles getting the people off the beaches. The threat of salt water crocodiles is very real.

As the skies darkened, we engaged in some black humour as we discussed how inadequate those nets seemed in the face of a large saltie.

It seems we were not far from the truth, as an attack in November 2017 led to the death of one man on that very same beach.

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Success stories and learnings

Restored Forests Breathe Life Into Efforts Against Climate Change

By JUSTIN GILLISDEC. 23, 2014

LA VIRGEN, Costa Rica — Over just a few decades in the mid-20th century, this small country chopped down a majority of its ancient forests. But after a huge conservation push and a wave of forest regrowth, trees now blanket more than half of Costa Rica.

Far to the south, the Amazon forest was once being quickly cleared to make way for farming, but Brazil has slowed the loss so much that it has done more than any other country to limit the emissions leading to global warming.

And on the other side of the world, in Indonesia, bold new promises have been made in the past few months to halt the rampant cutting of that country’s forests, backed by business interests with the clout to make it happen.

In the battle to limit the risks of climate change, it has been clear for decades that focusing on the world’s immense tropical forests — saving the ones that are left, and perhaps letting new ones grow — is the single most promising near-term strategy.

That is because of the large role that forests play in what is called the carbon cycle of the planet. Trees pull the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, out of the air and lock the carbon away in their wood and in the soil beneath them. Destroying them, typically by burning, pumps much of the carbon back into the air, contributing to climate change.

Over time, humans have cut down or damaged at least three-quarters of the world’s forests, and that destruction has accounted for much of the excess carbon that is warming the planet.

But now, driven by a growing environmental movement in countries that are home to tropical forests, and by mounting pressure from Western consumers who care about sustainable practices, corporate and government leaders are making a fresh push to slow the cutting — and eventually to halt it. In addition, plans are being made by some of those same leaders to encourage forest regrowth on such a giant scale that it might actually pull a sizable fraction of human-released carbon dioxide out of the air and lock it into long-term storage.

With the recent signs of progress, long-wary environmental groups are permitting themselves a burst of optimism about the world’s forests.

“The public should take heart,” said Rolf Skar, who helps lead forest conservation work for the environmental group Greenpeace. “We are at a potentially historic moment where the world is starting to wake up to this issue, and to apply real solutions.”

Still, Greenpeace and other groups expect years of hard work as they try to hold business leaders and politicians accountable for the torrent of promises they have made lately. The momentum to slow or halt deforestation is fragile, for many reasons. And even though rich Western governments have hinted for years that they might be willing to spend tens of billions of dollars to help poor countries save their forests, they have allocated only a few billion dollars.

Around the world, trees are often cut down to make room for farming, and so the single biggest threat to forests remains the need to feed growing populations, particularly an expanding global middle class with the means to eat better. Saving forests, if it can be done, will require producing food much more intensively, on less land.

“For thousands of years, the march of civilization has been associated with converting natural ecosystems to crops that serve only man,” said Glenn Hurowitz, a managing director at Climate Advisers, a consultancy in Washington.

“What’s happening now is that we are trying to break that paradigm. If that succeeds, it’s going to be a major development in human history.”

A Remarkable Comeback

Deep inside a Costa Rican rain forest, white-faced capuchin monkeys leapt through the tree tops. Nunbirds and toucans flew overhead, and a huge butterfly, flashing wings of an iridescent blue, fluttered through the air.

Ignoring the profusion of life around him, Bernal Paniagua Guerrero focused his gaze on a single 20-foot tree, placing a tape measure around the spindly trunk and calling a number out to his sister, Jeanette Paniagua Guerrero, who recorded it on a clipboard.

With that, the tree, a black manú just over two inches in diameter, entered the database of the world’s scientific knowledge. Its growth will be tracked year by year until it dies a natural death — or somebody decides to chop it down for the valuable, rot-resistant wood.

The Paniaguas and their co-worker, Enrique Salicette Nelson, work for an American scientist, Robin Chazdon, helping her chronicle a remarkable comeback.

Cuatro Rios, the forest they were standing in one recent day, looked, to a casual eye, as if it must have been there forever. Trees stretched as high as 100 feet, and a closed canopy of leaves cast the understory into deep shade — one hallmark of a healthy tropical rain forest.

In fact, the land was a cattle pasture only 45 years ago. When the market for beef fell, the owners let the forest reclaim it. Now the Cuatro Rios forest, near the tiny village of La Virgen, is a study plot for Dr. Chazdon, an ecologist from the University of Connecticut, who has become a leading voice in arguing that large-scale forest regrowth can help to solve some of the world’s problems.

Indeed, forests are already playing an outsize role in limiting the damage humans are doing to the planet.

For the entire geologic history of the earth, carbon in various forms has flowed between the ground, the air and the ocean. A large body of scientific evidence shows that the amount of carbon in the air at any given time, in the form of carbon dioxide, largely determines the planet’s temperature.

The burning of coal, oil and natural gas effectively moves carbon out of the ground and into the active carbon cycle operating at the earth’s surface, causing a warming of the globe that scientists believe is more rapid now than in any similar period of geologic history.

Though the higher temperatures are causing extensive problems, including heat waves and rising seas, the increasing carbon dioxide also acts as a sort of plant fertilizer. The gas is the primary source of the carbon that plants, using the energy of sunlight, turn into sugars and woody tissue.

Scientific reports suggest that 20 percent to 25 percent of the carbon dioxide that people are pumping into the air is being absorbed by trees and other plants, which keep taking up more and more even as human emissions keep rising.

But when people damage or destroy forests, that puts carbon dioxide into the air, worsening the warming problem. Historically, forests have been chopped down all over the planet. Now they are actually regrowing across large stretches of the Northern Hemisphere, and the most worrisome destruction is occurring in relatively poor countries in the tropics.

Scientists concluded decades ago that deforestation must be stopped, both to limit climate change and to conserve the world’s biological diversity. These days, they are also coming to understand the huge potential of new or recovering forests to help pull dangerous emissions out of the air.

“Every time I hear about a government program that is going to spend billions of dollars on some carbon capture and storage program, I just laugh and think, what is wrong with a tree?” said Nigel Sizer, director of forest programs at the World Resources Institute, a think tank in Washington. “All you have to do is look out the window, and the answer is there.”

Scientists are still trying to figure out how much of a difference an ambitious forest regrowth strategy could make. But a leading figure in the discussion — Richard A. Houghton, acting president of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts — has argued for turning some 1.2 billion acres of degraded or marginally productive agricultural land into forests.

That is an exceedingly ambitious figure, equal to about half the land in the United States. But researchers say it would be possible, in principle, if farming in poor countries became far more efficient. Some countries have already pledged to restore tens of millions of acres.

Dr. Houghton believes that if his target were pursued aggressively, and coupled with stronger efforts to protect existing forests, the rapid growth of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could be slowed sharply or possibly even halted.

That, he believes, would give the world a few decades for an orderly transition away from fossil fuels. “This is not a solution, but it would help us buy some time,” Dr. Houghton said.

Finding an Effective Tactic

The Amazon, spreading across nine countries of South America, is the world’s largest tropical forest. The majority of the Amazon is in Brazil, which for decades treated it as a limitless resource.

Sometimes aided by United States government funding for development, Brazil encouraged road construction that effectively opened the forest to settlement, including illegal land grabs. Crews harvested select trees for timber and then cut or burned the rest to make room for cattle ranching and soybean farming.

Deforestation was so rampant that by the middle of the last decade, 17 percent of the Amazon had been cut, and millions more acres had been damaged. Environmental groups worldwide sounded the alarm, as did indigenous and traditional peoples whose ancestors had lived in the forest for thousands of years.

Deforesting the World

Since the dawn of civilization, humans have destroyed or badly damaged perhaps three-quarters of the world’s forests. This map shows loss and gain of forest cover over the last decade, including mechanical removal, fire and disease. Since the 19th century, forests have been re-established across large areas of the Northern Hemisphere, but in the tropics, they are still under broad assault.

As deforestation hit a peak in 2004, the Brazilian government came under international condemnation, and it began trying to halt the destruction. In 2006, environmental groups found a way to bring marketplace pressure to bear.

Crops grown on deforested land, notably soybeans, were being used to produce meat for Western companies like McDonald’s, creating a potential liability in the eyes of their customers. Greenpeace invaded McDonald’s restaurants and plastered posters of Ronald McDonald wielding a chain saw. That company and others responded by pressuring their suppliers, who imposed a moratorium on products linked to deforestation.

The Brazilian government used satellites to step up its monitoring, cut off loans to some farmers in counties with high deforestation rates, and used aggressive police tactics against illegal logging and clearing. Brazilian state governments and large business groups, including some beef producers, joined the efforts.

The intense pressure resulted in a sharp drop in deforestation, by 83 percent, over the past decade. Moreover, the Brazilian ministry of agriculture began to focus on helping farmers raise yields without needing additional land.

Not only were millions of acres of forest saved, but the carbon dioxide kept out of the air by Brazil’s success also far exceeded anything any other country had ever done to slow global warming. Norway put up substantial funds to aid the effort, but otherwise, Brazil did it without much international help.

With so little money from abroad, the gains in Brazil are considered fragile, especially if a future government were to lose interest in forest protection. Daniel C. Nepstad, an American forest scientist who has worked in Brazil for decades and now heads a group called the Earth Innovation Institute, said, “We could still see a huge slide backward.”

The Next Big Test

With deforestation somewhat under control in Brazil, Indonesia is becoming a big test of the environmental groups’ strategy.

Deforestation is rampant there, with people chopping down even national forests with impunity. The biggest reason is to clear land for the lucrative production of vegetable oil from the fruit of a type of palm tree.

Just a handful of companies sell the oil — used in a wide array of consumer goods like soap, ice cream, confections and lipstick — into global markets, and the environmental groups have been targeting these big middlemen. Companies controlling the bulk of the global palm-oil trade have recently signed no-deforestation pledges, and Indonesia’s influential chamber of commerce recently threw its weight behind a demand for new forest legislation in the country.

But even if Indonesia takes strong action, there are fears that the gains could prove fleeting. The economic incentive to chop down forests remains powerful, and crackdowns on deforestation can just spur profiteers to go elsewhere.

“Asian companies are rushing into Africa and grabbing as much land as possible,” said Mr. Hurowitz, of Climate Advisers. “That’s kind of scary.”

Still, with hopes running high that the world may finally be rounding a corner on the deforestation problem, attention is turning to the possibility of large-scale forest regrowth.

Dr. Chazdon believes strongly in halting deforestation, but she says that many of the plots of old-growth forest that have already been saved are too small to ensure the long-term survival of the plants and animals in them. Forest expansion onto nearby land could help to conserve that biological diversity, in addition to pulling carbon dioxide out of the air.

But the strategy presents many challenges. It will require abandoning marginal agricultural land, meaning the remaining farms will have to become more efficient to keep up with demand for food, as well as a growing demand for biofuels. And some scientists have warned that if the strategy is poorly executed, agriculture could merely be pushed away from forests into grasslands or savannas, which themselves contain huge amounts of carbon that could escape into the atmosphere.

Costa Rica, a “green republic” famous worldwide for its efforts to protect forests, shows how difficult a forest restoration strategy can be in practice.

Legal protection is minimal for much of the forest that has grown there in recent decades. The workers who help Dr. Chazdon track her plots often see telltale signs of illegal hunting and logging, and they say the authorities are lax about stopping it. “So many ugly things happen that we just lose a little faith,” said Mr. Paniagua, one of the workers.

Moreover, a wave of pineapple production to supply a growing world market is sweeping the country, tempting many owners to reclear their land. Growing Chinese demand, in particular, has raised the fear that “the whole of Costa Rica will be paved in pineapples,” said Carlos de la Rosa, director of La Selva Biological Station, a famed research outpost where Dr. Chazdon does much of her work.

But for now, the second-growth forests of Costa Rica, covering roughly 14 percent of the land area of the country, at least show what may be possible if the world gets more ambitious about tackling global warming. Brazil, too, is beginning to see regrowth on a large scale in the Amazon, and is spending millions to restore forests along its Atlantic coast.

Decades of watching the Costa Rican forests recover have taught Dr. Chazdon that, at least in areas that still have healthy forests nearby to supply seeds, the main thing human beings need to do is just get out of the way. After all, forests were recovering from fires and other natural calamities long before people ever came along to chop them down.

“The forests know how to do this,” Dr. Chazdon said. “They’ve been doing it forever, growing back.”

Correction: December 25, 2014
An article on Wednesday about conserving and restoring forests as a strategy to fight climate change referred incorrectly in some editions to the relative size of the Amazon forest. The Amazon is about two-thirds the size of the lower 48 American states; it does not cover more land than the lower 48 states.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

How to Make a Forest | OPEN Magazine

2 June 2012

How to Make a Forest

...with minimum fuss and maximum effect

It is possible to make the most adverse circumstances bend to extraordinary will. The story of one such green warrior in the Doodhatoli mountains of Uttarakhand

BY Sopan Joshi EMAIL AUTHOR(S)

Way to go

SACHCHIDANAND BHARATI Building water tanks to save the forest

Before their menfolk started migrating out in droves, before rainwater started running off the eroded slopes of the Doodhatoli mountains in Uttarakhand, the people here had suffered an erosion of confidence and dignity. So Sachchidanand Bharati didn’t believe it when he read in 1993 about the region’s age-old water management systems. It was an account of large ponds called taal (like Nainital), small ponds called khaal, and chaal, a string of small, terraced tanks to catch water running off the slope.
If the book was right, the name of Bharati’s village—Ufrainkhaal—meant it was built around a small pond. But there wasn’t one. He went around asking old people, but nobody knew of the existence of a small pond in Ufrainkhaal, 6,000 feet above sea level in the mountains north of the Jim Corbett National Park.
A teacher in the village intermediate school, Bharati had cut his teeth as a young volunteer in the Chipko movement of the 1970s, hanging around environmentalist Chandi Prasad Bhatt. He was well known in the neighbourhood for rallying the villagers of the area against a government logging permit in 1982 to fell the forests that sustained them. His efforts were non-violent and successful: the government had to rescind the logging permit. But the forests were degraded because rain, which was plentiful, ran off the slopes into distant valleys, eroding the soil along the way. The rainwater had to be retained on the slopes.
But there were no accounts to be found of building khaals and chaals to catch the gushing runoff. Bharati decided to experiment with designs and sites in 1993. The hill folk knew their terrain, knew terraced farms and thought, as Bharati found, in three dimensions, unlike the plainspeople. But the water scarcity and the degraded forests had made livelihoods impossible, and the villages were bereft of men, who had gone ‘down’ in search of employment.
Bharati began talking to the women who were left behind. In the first year, they built a chaal on a monsoonal channel that had dried up. After the next monsoon, it retained water longer, the surrounding soil remained moist, the forest looked healthier. Over the next five years, Bharati’s Doodhatoli Lok Vikas Sansthan built several chaals in Ufrainkhaal and neighbouring villages, improving their design through trial.
They had broken free of the vicious cycle of drought/flood—more water meant the forests were getting more dense, which in turn retained even more water. The big test came during the drought of 2000-01. Forest fires are a regular feature in the pine plantations that pass for government forests in the region—pine kills all undergrowth and its needles pile up into a tinderbox. The fires did not spread to the regenerated oak forests, which have soil moisture and diversity. Yet there was the fear that the fires will engulf them, so the village women who had built the chaals turned out in numbers to prevent fires in government forests. Three women died in these efforts. The fire was controlled.
The women guard the forest with their lives. Literally. Their method is remarkable. Guard duty is determined by khakhar, a stick with bells tied on top. Whoever sees the khakhar pitched in front of her house takes the next turn at guard duty. When she gets tired, she goes and pitches it in front of a neighbour’s house. Simple. No duty roster, no register, no grievance. They don’t need official orders or coercion to protect what is theirs.
They also don’t need a budget or an office building or a development project. Their only major expense is on the sweets they distribute at their camps; this is met through donations from friends and well-wishers. Labour is contributed without cost. The annual expenses seldom exceed Rs 25,000.
No need for full-time staff either. Apart from the school teacher Bharati, there are three others who work for this non-organisation. There is Devi Dayal, their postman; Dinesh, a vaidya who practises ayurveda; and Vikram Singh, who runs a grocery shop. All four have to meet lots of people every day. Messages get conveyed and relayed just fine with homegrown IT that mainly resides between the ears, and people turn up to volunteer without Facebook reminders.
Bharati and his colleagues have steadfastly rejected the trappings of a formal organisation. They don’t issue press releases or seek publicity, they do not demand development funding. In fact, they once refused an FAO offer of a grant of Rs 1 crore. The villagers here know a healthy forest is essential to survive, and they revel in being its protectors. When the government offered a watershed development project, Bharati politely refused.
Yet they have built about 20,000 chaals in about 125 villages over the past 19 years—the numbers are estimates, because they don’t go around counting and documenting their work; they just do it, and move to the next task. And they don’t have fancy terms like ‘social forestry’, ‘community forestry’ or ‘Joint Forest Management’ to describe their work either. The largest of their regenerated forests is in Daund, which spans about 800 hectares.
It’s not just the expanse either. The canopy of their regenerated forests is 100 feet high. The humus on the floor is several inches thick. There are birds and wild animals. There is water for the forest, for agriculture and to grow fodder. There is liquidity for all kinds of life.

Madras Ramblings