Eco India: Can Delhi save its forests without destroying what makes them valuable?

So you see these people are working here and it's all open, there is no shade in this current space. So we see this temperature reading going above 51.3 degrees Celsius, which is the air temperature right now. Greenpeace volunteer Nibedita Zaha is out on this hot summer afternoon in Delhi's Dwarka area, conducting a thermal mapping exercise. This thermal camera is also telling us the actual feel like temperature right now in this environment what they are facing, which is above 51 almost. So definitely it is pretty much higher than what IMD's predictions are and a prolonged continuation of working in this case of scenarios without taking breaks or without having proper food or drink, it can be very much harmful to their body. Dwarka is one of Delhi's most built-up landscapes, flanked by the airport, a railway junction and the busy Dwarka Expressway. And crammed within these concretized boundaries is the urban village of Shahabad, Mohammadpur. So now we are inside a colony, it is almost 3 o'clock in the morning and today's highest temperature is also not very high, still the surface temperature here is touching almost 55, which means that we can automatically feel how much heat is trapped here. Only a couple of meters away from the neighborhood lies the Dwarka forest. Once inside, Nibedita notes a huge dip in temperature. It actually gives me a lot of relief and it makes my body feel a little cooler. The Dwarka forest is an unrecognized 120 acres plot, evolved over three decades on barren government land. Today it is a full-grown forest and a crucial oasis for the residents of Shahabad, Mohammadpur. For most living here, walking through its shaded pathways provides much-needed respite from the city's heat. The relevance of the forest, however, is lost to the Rail Land Development Authority. It is currently in the middle of planning a railway terminal right through it. Since 2022, trees are being felled systematically and the land is slowly turning into a dumping ground for construction waste. The reasoning provided is simple. The Delhi Master Plan had set this land aside for redevelopment before it turned into a forest. For 25-year-old resident Naveen Solanki, the matter is personal. As head of the Save Dwarka Forest campaign, he has been defending its right to exist for the last four years. Since then, every day, he is on call for spot-checking damages. This is, as you can see, how they bring mud from the other side, they dump it in the forest using trucks. They slowly cover the trees till their canopy line. And then that's how you call burying a forest alive, burying trees alive. There are about 5,000 trees that have died in this similar manner. You can see a few logs also here. This is a puddle that the Forest Department made after the High Court directed them to place water for the animals and all. In 2024, Naveen was able to save a part of the forest. The Supreme Court had declared 30 acres of this land as deemed forest and stayed the felling of trees by the railway authorities. But that is not enough, Naveen tells us. The entire forest should be protected from future losses. The forest faces a threat, not just because it was reportedly earmarked for redevelopment. Officials argue that it is also dominated by the invasive Vilayati Kikad trees. Although a recent survey mentions the presence of several native species as well. The question begged to be asked then is this, does an ecosystem warrant wiping out if an invasive species dominates its landscape? Or should it be scientifically restored instead? Just 20 kilometers from the Dwarka forest, we shift focus to the Central Ridge, a legally protected reserved forest where so-called restoration activities are underway. Here, giant excavators have been clearing invasive trees from large stretches, following the Forest Department's orders. So this is where the JCB was at work. I mean, I've never seen anything so ridiculous, you know. They've even got a little moat here, they've got little pathways. Naturalist and environmental activist Pradeep Krishan has been a regular here. He tells us how the use of earthmovers to remove invasive trees has already harmed the Ridge's ecosystem. It is absolutely essential to remove invasive species. The question is, how do you do it? If you remove it by using bulldozers that actually churn up the soil and remove top soil, you are destroying the greatest asset that the Central Ridge has today, in the form of biocrust, in the form of fungi, in the form of termites, in the form of all the creatures that live in the soil at a fairly shallow level. The way to remove precipice is to do it by hand. What adds to this is the Forest Department's plan to reshape the landscape into themed forests and visitor blocks. This is, if you look at what they've done, they've laid it out in some kind of theme park. It's no different from a municipal horticulture thingy, you know. It's a municipal garden, you know, and they're calling it a Panchavati Van. The Forest Department calls it restoration, but experts point out this is not very different from the slow decimation of a billion-year-old self-sustaining forest ecosystem. And this area we're in now is an area that I used to know really well because this was one of the places that led me to some barna trees that have now been uprooted here. And I remember this neem tree very clearly, and some of the termite mounds that have been smashed that you see ahead of us. But I mean, this is completely unrecognisable from the ridge that I knew. Look, I don't think the Forest Department thinks it's doing anything wrong. I think they believe that what they're doing is restoration. They just don't know what a restorative process is. Pradeep also questions the selection of trees for a terrain with relatively dry soil. The trees that they're planting, they tend to like to grow ficus trees. So a lot of the trees that they plant will require to be on a kind of drip line, on life support by being irrigated for five years, seven years, I believe some of the contracts they give out, for irrigation for 10 years. If you were to just simply plant all these species, you know, close by in a grid, you'd never get any useful results. Whether it is burying a living forest under concrete in one through one scientific process, Delhi's approach to managing its forests raises a difficult question. How can the city conserve its forests without undermining the ecosystems they protect? So the only way to actually do this well is to plant native, to plant trees that are already adapted to growing in this particular set of minerals, soil, climate, rainfall regime. You need to really work with species that are perfectly adapted to growing here. Species that you can see growing, let's say, in a place like Mangalbani, you know, which is on the Faridabad border. We tried contacting the Forest Department, but they were unavailable for comment. Pradeep points out, though, that in most cases, it is political pressure that forces the hands of forest authorities. They're being forced to do things that perhaps they wouldn't do if they were left to themselves. They're talking about Timpakt Vanas, they're talking about a Miyawaki forest. The Chief Minister of Delhi is talking about Gaushalas. I have a sense that a strong Forest Department that was committed to restoration and had some kind of independence would be able to say, look, these are not, they don't belong to a restorative process. Beyond definitions of restoration, for many Delhi residents, these urban forests stand for something simpler. A place to quieten down and reconnect with the self. In Sanjaywan, part of Delhi's Central Ridge, psychologist Muskaan Sancheti leads a guided walk. People from all walks of life come. Being a part of such a community where we go into natural spaces, where we take time to slow down and regulate a little bit within nature, helps them find a way back to themselves in a way. It helps them to ground and it helps us make a community which is formed on the basis of just coming together and being together in nature. The group walks through the forest collecting fallen leaves, seeds and twigs to create art. For most, it is a healing experience. So there's a point in Sanjaywan where there's a hilltop area where we went and it was stunning for me because I have never seen so much lush green, you know, forest, especially in Delhi. I never knew it existed. I don't know, something hit in me and I was just paused, I was stopped, like nothing was going inside my mind and I was just admiring the beauty of it. And later on I got to know that they're planning to cut the trees, certain trees who are of English origin, because they are harmful to the other trees that are there already. So in a way it felt a very kind of a paradoxical situation. Delhi, reports suggest, has lost over 77,000 trees between 2008 and 2018 alone. It is anybody's guess how many of these belonged to a natural forest. Meanwhile, the scientific community and the local citizens continue to fight for legal recognition of its forest ecosystems and imperatively scientific understanding and institutional independence. Forests should be left to function as forests.