Natural instinct

Man who gave Nature back to Delhi

Who thought that the site of barren mining pits could actually become a treat for the senses. You may want to go there as an escape from the maddening city life and take your children to educate them about our ecological system. This has been made possible by a retired professor at the Delhi University who has not only brought back life to the mining ravaged Aravalis, but has also shown Government the way. NIDHI MITTAL reports

When he came to Delhi 35 years ago, neither did he nor anyone else know the difference he would eventually make to the city. He started off as a professor in Delhi University. Over the years, Dr C R Babu progressed to become the pro Vice-Chancellor before retiring.
But sitting at home was not on the cards of Babu, now Professor Emeritus at the School of Environment Studies in DU. He followed his urge to find a solution to the depleting eco system of the national Capital. At 69, this professor has achieved what the Government had been gasping to do for many years. He has brought back Nature to a city polluted to its roots.
Cut to 1997: Asola and Bhatti areas were nothing but vast stretches of barren lands with no water, plant, birds or animals in sight. The reason? The Aravalis had been exploited for minerals for over 100 years, and life had thus gone out of this once green terrain. Huge mining pits, as deep as 250 feet, were what dominated the site.
Cut to 2009: Same place but with a sea change. Gone were the gaping mud pits, the dirt tracks and the ugly face of mutilated hills. In their place were endless grasslands, lush trees as high as 20 to 30 feet, colourful flowers, restless butterflies, creaking insects, chirping birds and dancing peacocks. Yes, thanks to Babu and his team, a large part of the bare and barren Asola and Bhatti mines are now a wildlife sanctuary.
As the professor — old in health but not in stride or enthusiasm — took one around to show the labour of his love, he insisted that he be known not just as an environmentalist but also as a researcher. You end to grant his wish immediately for it is he who changed how Delhi breathes now, thanks to the one of the three ecological lifelines he has created for the Capital — one being the Asola/Bhatti wildlife sanctuary, the Yamuna biodiversity park and the third being the Aravali biodiversity zone.
Report after report has exposed the political lobbying and business interests in the extraction of minerals, leaving the entire range sapped of everything it was once rich in — magnificence, water, natural vegetation, wildlife and birds.
Clouds of dust, drilling sounds and coughing human machines dominate the sight of a mining pit on which work is still on. Moving on to the one that is now seemingly ‘breathing easy’ as no mean diggers haunt it anymore since it is not left with even an iota more to offer. ‘Seemingly breathing easy’ because though men have left it alone, the deep pit, which was once a part of a high rising hillock and was home to many flora and fauna, frequented by herbivores like the beautiful Nilgai or Blue Bull and deers, and carnivores like leopards, is now struggling for survival.
The hope for a greener future has come from the restoration of a 100-year-old Aravali mining pit, touching Vasant Vihar in New Delhi. Now known as the Aravali Biodiversity Park near the Air India Colony, the serene and green area was a barren land of multiple pits extracted of clay, red stone and other minerals. This was just till four years back, when Former Lt Governor of Delhi asked Prof Babu to restore the pits, so that they can be brought back to their pristine glory.
“Former Lt Gov Vijay Kapoor asked me some five years back if I could develop a Biodiversity Park on a piece of land. I immediately said yes. I was already looking for an opportunity to bring back the lost vegetation to Delhi. Within a week, he called back to say that he has 150 acre land along the river Yamuna upstream. He told me ‘You start developing the park and we will add some more land to it.’ I submitted a plan within weeks which was approved. I then told him about Aravalis and he instantly told me he has 670 acres there. I was excited and saw it as a change-making moment,” recalls Prof Babu.
From the look of it, the park gives an impression that it has been in place for many years and was always inhabited by vegetation and was a dense forest. The extensive grasslands that spread till the eye goes and the trees spread out in a way that they form canopies tell a different story. However, the reality is quite different.
As barren as any other mining pit and inhabited by a big weed called Prosopis Juliflora or Kabuli Keekar, the 670-acre uneven area with many pits bereft of even ground water, presented a bleak picture. But what now one sees is a tropical rainforest, an orchidarium, a fernarium, a butterfly park, a herbal garden, not to mention vast stretches of huge trees, wetlands and grasslands.
All this on the soil that was completely infertile and sodic in nature which meant not even a blade of grass could grow on it.
Prof Babu and his team of scientists developed a technique using which they not only made the soil fertile and have brought back the native vegetation but also attracted huge Government interest, all without further tampering with the topography of the area. That is why the Eco Task Force of the Army is carrying out the restoration works in the Asola and Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuaries, which was also initiated by the same team.
The highly degraded Delhi Aravalis, owing to anthropogenic activites like mining, are spread over nearly 7,770 hectares which is, by law, protected from encroachment and all kinds of developmental activites, and is a declared reserved forest. Most of this area is either barren or invaded by the exotic species Prosopis, seen all over the ridge area.
While explaining the technology, Prof Babu says that the pits are desertified sites and just planting trees would bear no fruits. To make the soil fertile again, microbes have to be introduced to it, along with the germinating seeds. Under natural conditions the plants acquire nutrients from microbes, “so we need microbes, not one but different kinds of them. We isolate and culture them in the laboratory to see how these microbes should be added to the soil or should be brought in close contact with the plants. If we put the microbes in the soil alone and not grow the plant, then they will die. The microbes and plants are closely associated because the plant grows and synthesises food, giving it back to the microbes. The microbes take up the nutrients and give them to the plants. They exist mutually,” explains Prof Babu.
Now when these plants die, they produce litter and this litter then forms food for some other microbes, leading to more plants. This is called the nutrient cycle. In these pits where the land or the soil is dug to a large extent, there is no nutrient cycle. To establish this nutrient cycle, scientists collected different groups of microbes by taking the soil from a forest and then isolated them in a laboratory, cultured them to make them in large numbers, which is in millions. “Then we use a technology in which you take the seed which is germinating and then coat it with a gel in which we have immobilised the microbes. The gel also contains nutrients for microbes to multiply, so that they do not die. These microbes then help the seed in germinating and the plant eventually comes up. That’s a critical step in the restoration of Aravalis,” points out Prof Babu.
He also tells you that the process takes three years and in a cycle of five years one can bring back the original native vegetation. What took them 12 years in bringing up the Asola and Bhatti areas was the fact that they had to develop them into full-fledged forests, natural to all wildlife. Of the entire Delhi Aravali range, Asola and Bhatti sanctuaries form 4,000 hectares of the area. The reason why Asola site was called desertified before restoration was that on the surface there was some soil but beneath that there was a salt pan or a concrete pan which is almost like a stone and no plant can survive in that content.
Bhatti on the other hand was a 100-year-old morum mined pit till 250 feet deep. “We started there with about a two hectare plot and thought of restoring it to the original vegetation consisting of Acacia woodlands used by the wildlife and grasslands inhabited by herbivores,” says Prof Babu. The team selected vegetation like Acacia woodlands and grasslands after studying the first communities of vegetation from all along the Aravalis and how they were vanishing. The group used eight species of Acacia and about 10 to 12 species of grasslands which are brought from different parts of Aravalis. Now the same morum mined pits have been developed into a forest with 40 species of plants and the density of the forest is such that no light reaches the ground.
Prof Babu and other team members insist that the whole idea behind restoring the mining pits is to make them into self-sustaining forest lands. The areas restored by them have been made in a way that they require manual watering in just the first year. After that they maintain themselves, provided the local people keep away from these sites, says Dr Suresh Babu, research scientist, Centre for Excellence Programme, Ministry of Environment and Forest.
He adds that if seeds are sowed in the three monsoon months, namely April, May and June, then even lesser water is required. The technology used to restore the morum mined pits at Bhatti and the desertified site at Asola are simple, cost-effective and provide rural employment. They then ultimately provide a series of ecosytem services and ecological boost to the plant communities. And Prof Babu insists that the cost for such a restoration work is minimal at Rs 70,000 per hectare.
“This is nothing as compared to the Government’s aforestation and deforestation programmes which fail in Haryana, for which even the World Bank has given a huge amount of money. We also have a big project in Orissa where we have restored, in four years, 200 acres of mined area. This is in Pornapani, 40 km from Rourkela. We have also restored one water body which was formed as a result of deep mining. It is about 150 meters deep. There was nothing in that water body, but today we find fishes varying in weight from 2.5 to 3 kg. The local villagers, about 60 in number, harvest fish and earn their living. The mine was used for supplying Limestone to the Rourkela plant. The forest that we have developed is much more richer than the forest found in the neighbouring regions,” says the 69-year-old professor who initiated it all.
The two life-supporting systems — Aravalis and Yamuna — perform a number of ecological functions. However, over a period of time they have depleted, owing to urban development and other anthropogenic activities. “Someone once told me that the wild bust used to roam near the Red Fort but now nothing can be seen. I was also told that there were lions in the Asola and Bhatti areas, we cannot even think of that now. All of them have become extinct,” recalls Prof Babu.
He also insists that the Aravalis is the catchment area of Delhi. The entire recharging of Delhi aquifers is taking place from Aravalis. The proof comes from the fact that all around Aravalis, 80 per cent are deep pits and after rains one never finds even a drop of water. This indicates that all the water goes into the aquifers. The Aravalis extend from Gujarat to Rajasthan to Haryana to Delhi. They spread over a length of 625 km and their width varies from 520 km to 250 km at various places.
Its another important function is that it prevents the spread of Rajastan’s Thar desert into the plains, particularly Delhi. It acts as a physical barrier between Delhi and Rajasthan protecting Gangetic plains. The Aravalis give the area its moisture helping the vegetation and prevents the dust storms from coming in. The dust storms in summers are due to the lack of the green cover on Aravalis, says Prof Babu. If you have a dense natural vegetation it also sets in local clouds resulting in local precipitation.
Going back in history, when the British shifted the Capital from Kolkata to Delhi, the ridge was completely barren. This was during the Mughal times. If one looks at the 1857 photos of Delhi (available in DU), one would find that deforestation had already taken place at that time. The British didn’t want this barren hillock and thought of providing a thick forest cover. They brought a Mexican species from Rajasthan, Kabuli Keekar, and used aerial seeding to broadcast it on the entire ridge. Over a period of 100 years, this Keekar has invaded the ridge and eliminated the native vegetation.
“We expect that 3,000 to 4,000 species of plants existed all along the Aravalis in different forest communities. We decided to bring all these species in our Biodiversity Park and established it into 30 to 40 communities. Today we have 400 species in the form of 25 to 30 communities. Some of the species have reached the canope size too,” says Prof Babu.
One of the pits in the park has been developed into an orchid community. “There was just one native orchid in Delhi. Orchids characteristically require high relative humidity and cool temperature, and that condition can be created in those pits without any extra energy, by growing tree species which will maintain the temperature and 50 to 70 per cent humidity. We have introduced 50 species of orchids and of them 15 have flowered for the first time.
This we developed just for promoting conservation education, and also to conserve those threatened orchids. Similarly there are other groups of plants which require such conditions, they are called ferns. There are some ferns in Delhi but they are all desert ferns. So here we have made a fernarium with 40 species. We have a large number of butterflies too,” says Prof Babu.
Delhi has a total of 74 species of butterfly, most of which are almost extinguished. After the butterfly park was made, the scientists did not bring any butterfly manually. Today, they have spotted all the 74 species there, and all of them have flown in themselves. There are 250 birds in the park. Dr Shah at the park tells you how they have spotted the Black Patridge or Kala Teetar, which had long disappeared from the ridge area. All this owing to the improvement in the habitat.
“Aravalis used to have a large number of herbivores and carnivores including leopards. If I want to bring them back to system, I must have extensive range lands or grasslands. Our grasslands spread over an area of 100 acres. There you find a large number of herbivores now including the Nilgai,” says Prof Babu.