Featuring Aravali Biodiversity Park in the Aravalli West Thorn Scrub Forests ecoregion.
I first heard of the Aravali Biodiversity Park in 2010 from Pradip Krishen, a friend and mentor in the field of rewilding. He asked if I was willing to work with a small group of people—a citizens’ initiative—that wanted to plant ‘a million trees’ and create a nature park on an old mining site at the edge of Gurgaon.
The 380-acre site was bleak and forbidding. A former mining site for quartzite rock and its orange, gravelly degrade, known as ‘badarpur’, there was hardly any vegetative cover except for some straggling, invasive Vilaiti Keekar (Prosopis juliflora). Mining had ceased several years earlier, and was now banned, though the scars of extraction were still raw and ugly. It was April, and there were no grasses or shrubs to relieve the desolate scene. My heart sank a little as I walked around, taking it all in.
IamGurgaon (IAG), a voluntary group founded by three determined women—Latika Thukral, Swanzal Kak Kapoor and Ambika Agarwal—sensed early on that this large, empty wasteland on the fringes of Gurgaon was vulnerable to encroachment or to being turned into a dumping ground. They proposed to Municipal Commissioner, Rajesh Khullar, in 2009, that it should be developed into a park. Khullar responded warmly to the idea and asked for proposals. The architects at IAG then went to work. Atal Kapoor, the main architect, was in charge of steering the civil works and design in this initial phase.
The Haryana Forest Development Corporation (HFDC) worked on the first avenue inside the Aravali Biodiversity Park in 2010, lining it with Brazilian Jacarandas, Australian Bottlebrush trees and Madagascaran Gulmohars. The planting scheme took off on this misguided note, with mostly exotic garden trees for a dry, rocky Aravallis landscape.
There’s nothing surprising about HFDC’s choice of species. This is how the Forest Corporation—all Forest Corporations in this country—thinks and works. There’s no attempt to find a match between a landscape being planted and the choice of plants. Ultimately, all such agencies just pick an assortment from the tried and limited stock of mostly ornamental trees and shrubs that nurseries have on offer.
As the rains of 2011 approached, IAG hatched a plan to plant ‘a million trees’ in Gurgaon, in collaboration with the Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon (MCG), starting with a plantation drive that would lift off from the Biodiversity Park. I hadn’t quite hit my stride yet but was assured that ‘a lot of native species’ were being sourced from Punjab. (Though I did wonder: ‘Really? Where in Punjab’?!)
Nurseries in India don’t usually raise or stock forest species. They don’t think that this is their remit. As it turned out, what arrived from Punjab by the truckload were trees like Neem (Azadirachta indica), Pilkhan (Ficus virens), Peepul (Ficus religiosa), Katsagaun (Fernandoa adenophylla) and Sheesham (Dalbergia sissoo), instead of Chamrod (Ehretia laevis), Salai (Boswellia serrata) and Dhau (Anogeissus pendula) which I had been led to expect. Hundreds of people turned up at the Biodiversity Park on our first planting day. We had little of any value to offer them to plant, but we went through the motions.
Within IAG, we had a huge churn, and everybody slowly began to see that it wasn’t about planting a million trees but creating a landscape and a habitat that was in harmony with the plants that grew in it. It felt like we had crossed a major milestone!
The change of attitude and strategy within IAG did not come about easily. Several visits to Mangar Bani, Sariska and other lovely forests of Aravallis inspired the team to take up the vision to create a native Aravalli rocky forest scape with its full panoply of plants—trees like Dhau (Anogeissus pendula), Kummath (Senegalia senegal), Salai (Boswellia serrata), Doodhi (Wrightia tinctoria) and Dhak (Butea monosperma), lots of shrubs and the full range of ephemeral grasses that spring up in the rains.
We took the new Municipal Commissioner, Sudhir Rajpal, to Mangar Bani so he could see what we meant when we talked of native wilderness. He was supportive and enthusiastic.
MCG ratified the goal of making the Biodiversity Park into a City Forest. IAG was formally assigned the tasks of carrying out conservation work, setting up a nursery of native plants, and doing the necessary research and surveying. We were given eight years—from 2012 to 2020—to implement these tasks.
We came up with an initial list of about 200 forest species native to the rocky northern Aravallis. Some of them had disappeared from view, but there was enough evidence to know that they were once present in the region. Now we had to get hold of the seeds of all these species and take complete charge of rewilding the park landscape. When the next fruiting season came around, we mounted a massive collection drive for seeds and vegetative cuttings by visiting wild and semi-wild areas near and far.
My special task was to try and understand where each kind of plant would be most ‘at home’. It may not seem obvious, but even a place like the Biodiversity Park is made up of a mosaic of tiny micro-habitats. Some plants are ‘generalists’, but most plants—more so in arid or stressed environments—specialise in where they are best adapted to live and do well, in different kinds of sites such as the foot of a hill or a hollow where there is sandy soil, or on a well-drained slope.
This is what I tried to observe and learn about in all my travelling and seed collecting. Our scientific ‘Floras’ (catalogue of all known plant species in a geographic region) are not very good at teaching you about what sort of conditions plants require. I was determined to learn as much as I could by observation. Dhau (Anogeissus pendula) grew on steep rocky slopes, Salai (Boswellia serrata) on the shoulders of hills, Babool (Acacia nilotica) only where the soil is deep and of good quality, with water close to the surface. The idea was not to make this park into a dense woodland but to create diverse habitats, including grasslands that would support varied forms of life typical of northern Aravalli.
Things are slow in dry, rocky places. The growing season is restricted to a precious few weeks in the year, and we knew we had to somehow hold out for a few more years before we could offer clear evidence that our approach and method were paying off.
IAG, spearheaded by Latika, Swanzal and Priti, took the lead in involving citizens, children and Gurgaon’s corporates in building support for the Park. The scale of our nursery work expanded exponentially and was funded entirely by donations.
Today, the Aravali Biodiversity Park showcases more than 300 species of plants, many of them being reintroductions to Haryana. With its diverse microhabitats, it has become a haven for 195 species of birds, making it one of the richest birding habitats in Delhi’s NCR. Animals such as Nilgais, jackals, palm civets, porcupines, hares, snakes and lizards are thriving in the Biodiversity Park today. This is even more true of butterflies, moths, beetles, bugs, aphids, ants and spiders.
Events to engage the city with this wilderness are taking shape. Periodic nature walks have become hugely popular. A programme to involve school children with nature awareness is going great guns! Corporates find enough engagement in the Park for team-building or pure volunteering. You can often spot business teams cleaning up garbage, composting leaf litter or volunteering in our nursery.
A sword of uncertainty still hangs over the future of Aravali Biodiversity Park. We have had to fight several battles to save the park from conversion into a zoo, crocodile park, or Singapore-style night safari, and, most recently, from a highway cutting through the centre of the park.
The future of the park rests on the immense support we have received from the people of Gurgaon. In the last seven years, fifty-eight corporations, more than fifty schools, thousands of children, and citizens from all walks of life have come to plant about 145,000 plants of 200 species in the Biodiversity Park. They have all become stakeholders in its future.
In 2022, Aravali Biodiversity Park was declared as India's first Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures (OECM) site by the IUCN, notifying it as a non-protected area that supports a rich biodiversity. Since April 2021, the Biodiversity Park has been managed by Hero MotoCorp Ltd. CSR, and we continue to guide its ecological programmes. Currently, work is ongoing for an interpretation centre and viewing decks.
Aravali Biodiversity Park still has a way to go before it becomes a mature forested landscape. But it tells a story of one of the only eco-restoration events in our country where citizens, corporations and the local administration have done so much to bring a natural forest landscape back to a city.
