A Lady With Green Skill

Each year, during plantation drives across the country, millions of saplings are planted but no statistics are available on the actual survival rate of these saplings. Perhaps many saplings do not survive due to unsuitable environmental conditions. Dr Chandra Prakash Kala says that environmental inventiveness is the need of the hour as shown by Leelawati Kala, who successfully planted several oak saplings in her village in Uttarakhand, despite the conditions being unfavourable for their growth.

- Dr Chandra Prakash Kala

Planting trees has been considered a philanthropic activity since time immemorial in the Indian religious philosophy. Further, a planted sapling being equated to the offspring is nurtured like a son or daughter. Though, less in number, there are philanthropists who still adopt and nurture trees as children. On the other hand, every year millions of saplings are planted across the country but how many of them survive hardly hits the news like the one that spreads while planting saplings.

Once in a village-level interactive meeting in Uttarakhand in the 1990s, a villager at Sumari candidly said when asked that why don’t they plant saplings around their village, “There is not an inch of land where saplings are not planted. But see these mountains are still barren”. 

Away from such meetings, an old woman in the same village was engaged in her routine work. Fondly known as Diptyan Dadi by the villagers as her husband was Deputy Collector in Garhwal–Kumaon Province during British Raj; Leelawati Kala preferred to stay back in her village Sumari. She loved greenery and hence spent most of her time in raising gardens. Though she did not have any formal education, she had a very sharp understanding of forest and forest ecology. She knew the environment and ecological factors that were required for a plant to grow successfully. It is a well-established ecological theory that along an altitudinal gradient, composition of forests changes in the Himalayan region. Accordingly, chir pine grows in the lower elevation and oaks at comparatively higher elevations.

Environmental Resourcefulness