Pradip Krishen (Illustration by Subrata Dhar)
On the sidelines of the recent Mountain Echoes Literary Festival in Bhutan, Pradip Krishen talks about the hidden life of trees and why India doesn’t get its conservation policies right.
How did you come to be interested in trees?
Studying trees started as a hobby around 1995, when I was in Pachmarhi (in Madhya Pradesh). A forester friend introduced me to the trees in the Satpura jungle. I soon began to identify individual trees. When I returned, I started looking at trees in Delhi, and, I realised, I didn’t know what they were. That’s when I thought about writing a small booklet to tell people about the common trees in the city. It took me six-seven years to come out with it. I also wrote a field guide (Trees of Delhi) for other people who’d been like me until recently — a layman writing books for other people.
Now, I call myself an ecological gardener. I work in fairly large parcels of land that are typically quite degraded. Some people call it ecological restoration, but we call it re-wilding. We are basically trying to recreate natural landscapes by taking them back to what they were like before.
What was the last such place that you restored?
A 70-hectare plot near Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur that was a huge area of volcanic rock. The land was choked by a particular tree found in Mexico and parts of South America, called prosopis juliflora or vilayati kikar, which can grow just about anywhere. In the 1930s, one of the maharajas heard from someone that if he wanted to ‘green’ his kingdom, he should plant this tree. Inspired by the idea, he went up in an aeroplane with a bag full of seeds and scattered them across the land. This tree secretes an alkaloid in its roots, which prevents anything else from growing. I had to first eradicate the kikar before bringing back plants that would grow on desert rock, from the Thar. This involved identifying and understanding what each plant requires such as the type of soil they’d best grow in. This type of information is not readily available — we had to experiment and keep a record. It’s been 13 years now, and the area — Rao Jodha Desert Rock Park — is flourishing.
Is that why you keep stressing on planting the right kind of tree?
Exactly. It’s absolutely essential to plant the right kind of tree. Unfortunately, nurseries across India tend to have a fixed pool of plants. If you count the number of species that Indian nurseries sell, it won’t be more than 60-70. Of these, typically half or more will be exotic trees. As a result, we’re using 30 trees of the 6,000 we have in the country. It is shocking that, as a civilisation, we are blind to all the beauty around us.
In the last book I wrote, Jungle Trees of Central India, I’ve described 168 species of trees of which 50-60 have never come into cultivation. One of the things I want to do is create teaching material that addresses this issue, especially for landscape architects. They are brilliant in planning and dealing with services and facilities, but they are not taught anything about plants. They are at the mercy of what the nurseries have. If we ask nurseries why they don’t provide other plants, they say there is no demand. If we ask the landscapers, they say the nurseries only have these types. It’s a terrible, vicious circle.
What is India’s forest cover now compared to a few years ago? Is it depleting?
I think it is around 17-19 per cent. Our mountainous areas have been devastated, mostly by human intervention. It is particularly bad in places such as Punjab and Haryana. In places like Madhya Pradesh, forest cover is decent but there are lot of underlying problems. One of them is the forestry system we inherited from the Germans, who were called in by the British to manage their forests. The Germans believe in plantation forestry, which means that they grow only what they want to use in rotation, and cut out everything else. When the British planted trees in Delhi after 1911, they made some mistakes. They didn’t experiment and introduced three new trees to the city, two of which failed and one which did really well.
Do you think the present government or those before have done enough to protect the environment?
In a general statement, we can say that it’s a bad moment in our national life. We have a government that is not particularly concerned about conservation — and it’s not just the BJP — no party has safeguarded the environment. We don’t have a green party that has taken on environmental issues. The development mantra and the GDP mantra has become so strong that the environment ministry is seen as a hindrance — it can’t be done away with completely because there are laws in place, but they want to try and take its teeth out.
This happened during the Congress rule as well, when M Veerappa Moily was the environment minister. He said ‘yes’ to everything. For instance, there is a forest close to Delhi which falls in the Faridabad district, called Mangar Bani. It is one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen. It’s been protected by Gujjars of three villages, who regard it as a sacred forest. It exists only because they protect it, not because of the government. The Gujjars didn’t want the government to notify it as a protected or a reserved forest. Originally, the forest was common village land. Then, there was a process by which common land all across Haryana became privatised and was given to individual villagers who were landowners. The Haryana government refused to recognise this as a forest and tried to open up the area for development by changing the land use category. This sent alarm bells ringing through the conservation community. The Supreme Court, in a series of judgments, has said that the definition of forest is not something that is protected or notified by law but anything that is a forest as per the dictionary meaning.
This was a case of the Congress government in Haryana wanting to play ball with the real estate community and hand them over prime land, saying this wasn’t a forest. In ways like that, especially at the state government level, there has been a tremendous amount of rubbish going on. It happens at a national level when there are big interests involved, like mining in Orissa.
How effective are bodies like the environment ministry and the National Green Tribunal (NGT) when it comes to conservation?
The Environment ministry offers people the opportunity to intercede and use laws to file caveats and be nuisances. If the ministry didn’t exist, we’d be worse off. The same applies to the NGT. They’ve given good as well as bad judgments. But, it provides an opportunity to contest something and put forward a point of view using logic and facts. To have that kind of a forum is important.
Of late, we keep reading news of plantation drives. Do plantation drives really help increase tree count?
The Delhi government constantly produces figures of how many lakhs of trees they planted in a year. Most of these trees are useless. When it comes to compulsory afforestation, an agency such as the Metro would pay the forest department to plant trees. The department, in turn, will find a village in the outskirts of Delhi, look for vacant land — usually tiny parcels the size of a badminton court — and plant about 2,000 trees so close to each other that only 100 survive.
The forest departments are one of the worst offenders — they do not know what wild trees are, even in their own states. I was once invited to the Asola Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuary by the department; they were distributing free trees and asking children to plant them. But no species was native to the area. I asked them why they can’t collect their own seeds and grow them instead of depending on nurseries and I left.
The reason why the Central Ridge in Delhi is in such bad shape is because of the nine species of trees planted there, none of which are native. They all died. There has to be more sense about what to plant. When it comes to Delhi, I categorise it into four different ecotypes — if a tree grows in Lodi Gardens, it doesn’t mean it will grow on the Ridge. The CPWD created a garden on the Ridge, the Buddha Jayanti Park, and planted the same kind of trees found in Lodi Gardens. It’s like bringing a polar bear to Delhi and giving it a big fridge to live in.
Do you think conservation and development can go hand-in-hand?
Of course. There are lots of examples from around the world. For instance, during a residency in Italy earlier this year, I met a city planner from Massachusetts who is doing a great job in the state. Ultimately it’s a planning issue, which is our country’s worst asset. We make plans that are a hangover from the time of the British — called trend-based planning — which the rest of the world has given up on because it is unsustainable. People realised resources are not infinite and that we can’t go on in this unsustainable trend. The whole of the thinking world decided to change the way we plan — not just about meeting trends but also thinking about desirable outcomes for each sector.
Has the 2040 Delhi Master plan factored in environmental issues?
It’s old fashioned. I haven’t studied it carefully but I doubt it’s made any departure from the previous plans.
