Media365
People don’t go much into the Central Ridge — not now and not then. This semi-wild tract of eight-and-a-half square kilometres once defined the western edge of colonial New Delhi. Nearly half of it was nibbled away in the 1960s, so it’s a lot smaller and finds itself in the heart of the city now. There’s a polo ground inside, and riding tracks. A giant Earth Station satellite dish points up at the sky, spying on someone or the other. Superstitious people venture in only a short distance to feed chapatis, chana and fruit to cows and monkeys, while jackals grab their chances to steal tidbits.
The Ridge may have shrunk but not a lot has changed in over a century. It was always a somewhat mysterious place, maybe even slightly frightening. There are fewer animals left now — all the porcupines, more than a hundred, were trapped and killed in the winter of 1926-27. Jackals have staged a comeback after being hunted down by the NDMC for keeping the Viceroy and Vicereine awake at night with their howling. Foxes have gone. Nilgais too. Only civets now, and maybe a few hares, mongoose, some rodents and snakes.
The biggest change is the ubiquity of vilayati keekar, planted in the 1920s by a man called William Mustoe who predicted that this tree from Central and South America would make a forest here one day. It did. He planted it because all the other trees planted on the Ridge died when irrigation was withdrawn. They were the wrong trees. Vilayati keekar was hardier, perfectly adapted to prosper in thin, dry rocky soil, and quickly became a scourge. It dominates the Ridge today and removing it has become the excuse for all kinds of awful things that are happening there now.
The Forest Department says it is “restoring” the Ridge to its “pristine purity”. In the last three months, bulldozers have cleared 200 hectares of the Central Ridge, ploughing up the soil and sweeping away all the old woody shrubs and lianas that are its natural flora. All of this to remove vilayati keekar and create a dense plantation forest, as prescribed by the Forest Research Institute, which wrote the afforestation plan.
Cleared land is now being planted with trees, most of which do not belong to this terrain. The same mistake they were making a century ago. Trees whose canopies will span 12 metres across or more are being planted 1.2 metres apart. Thirsty trees like jamun and arjun that grow on riverbanks are being planted along with others in densities of 2,500 per hectare — more crowded together than trees in a rainforest.
This is not “restoration” — the Ridge is being dismantled by a deadly cocktail of ignorance and ineptitude.
It’s worse than that, because some aspects of the restoration work will cause irreversible damage. Forest Department tenders require contractors to use toxic chemicals for anti-termite treatment whenever they do any planting. This is horrifying on two counts — first, because especially in dry forests, termites are beneficial insects and ought to be protected instead of exterminated; two, the chemicals kill everything in the soil — microorganisms, fungi, insects, all forms of life that make up a living soil. One of the toxins is banned in India. A public outcry forced the Department to retract its tender, but the Ridge has pools of dead soil dotted about.
Small one-acre theme-park “vans” are springing up on the Ridge in a sea of bougainvillea and other exotic ornamental plants that mimic a third-rate municipal park. Are these early signs of the “parkification” of the Ridge? Is this the imagination that drives “restoring a natural forest”?
There’s more — like plans to make dense Miyawaki forests, which bear little resemblance to natural landscapes. The Delhi government promises that parts of the Ridge will be given to gaushalas. The Forest Department has plans for a bonsai park and a new interpretation centre.
We are watching the unravelling of the Central Ridge. The excuse for all the sweeping away of woody shrubs and old trees — getting rid of invasive vilayati keekar — is a feeble one, because there are much better ways of eradicating this tree slowly, in phases, without destroying everything else.
All this disturbance is going to give Delhi a difficult winter. Hundreds of hectares of loosened dry soil are certain to cause a massive spike in trapped aerosol dust. The magnitude of water required to irrigate lakhs of unsuitable trees is another worry. Where will so much water come from in this water-deficit city? If it’s anaerobically treated sewage water, it will carry a load of excess nitrates and pesticide residues, damaging to both soil and plants.
Will Delhi care at all that the Central Ridge is being dismantled? Remember, the Ridge is not much visited, so perhaps there isn’t that sense of ownership or familiarity that would make people line up to object. But the Central Ridge is only the tip of the iceberg — almost exactly the same things are happening to all of Delhi’s Ridge forests and Biodiversity Parks. “Restoration” is the excuse, but it’s stripped of all meaning.
There’s plenty of solid environmental reasons for keeping the Ridge and restoring it properly. But let me just say this — if the Ridge slips away to become another third-rate municipal park, Delhi will have lost something immensely precious.
Krishen, an environmentalist, is the author of Trees of Delhi
