Delhi Ridge restoration: Are we helping nature or getting in its way?

But she wasn’t done with me quite yet. The ankle flared up again, this time red and swelling up… I gritted my teeth and added dips in warm saline water to the treatment — which brought relief — and forgave her. So much so that I insisted on taking a set of her beautiful tulip photographs (alas they were imported tulips, taken at Lodi Gardens) for framing to a sinfully expensive framer at swanky Khan Market. Halfway there, the deluge began. Then I noticed that the windscreen wipers had been reduced to shreds, by Mother Nature’s favourite subjects – monkeys. They had removed the rear wiper entirely.

We crawled on, the windows misting up romantically. The ankle was playing up hell, and I was in no mood to appreciate the big silver raindrops pelting down on the asphalt, drumming on the roof, pearling down the windows, the fine spume and spray left by the cars or the happy waving of leaves as they enjoyed the drenching. All I knew was we hadn’t brought an umbrella, and I had to be doubly careful I did not slip spectacularly on the sidewalk. Mother Nature ought to go and take a hike, I thought sourly.

We stopped for the umpteenth time at a traffic light, where you get 5 seconds of green and 15 minutes of red. And then up ahead I caught sight of the girl – a street child – soaked through clad in brown rags, darting from one clouded window to the next proffering a bouquet of garnet roses wrapped up in cellophane, and trying to push her wet hair out of her face.

My eyes just flitted past her – I wasn’t even interested enough to take a photograph: a ghostly gleaming brown ragamuffin proffering red roses in a rainstorm, dwarfed by the vague silhouettes of hulking silver SUVs, forget about wondering where she had acquired them from.

I deposited my photos, and we drove home by which time it was (in typical Delhi fashion – minimal attention span) bone dry. That afternoon, I began thinking again of that little girl: was she (like me) a nature lover? What did she know about the environment, or indeed if any such thing existed?

And then in the paper there was the report that a massive four-year Delhi ‘Ridge Restoration Plan’ had been given the ‘green signal’ (probably more than 5 seconds long!) endorsed and blessed by three ostensibly nature-loving holier-than-thou heavies in the government who had got busy planting native (to India, but alien to the Ridge) trees – amla, banyan, peepal, ashok, bael and ashok, – in concentric circles around a wooden hut, apparently replicating the design of our ‘sacred forests’ of thousands of years ago, by first destroying whatever native flora had stood there before, and after being caught using toxic chemicals to destroy termites and whatever else had been living and working in the soil before. And this was just a modest start, covering just a handful of hectares. The aim is ostensibly to promote eco-tourism, but no, parking facilities will not be provided, though I guess tea and ‘biskut’ stalls will spring up like mushrooms everywhere.

There is a simple adage in nature – leave Mother Nature alone and she will take care of herself thank you very much. Yes, vilayati kikar is a major problem on the Ridge – vermin – but we humans introduced it to the Ridge, like we have done rats on tropical islands. And like so many big business houses they have now all but taken over — sucking up the water, refusing to let anything else grow — and pricking you nastily if you object.

Ecologists are naturally up in arms about this allegedly sacred forest that they describe as nothing but an ornamental municipal garden where heavyweights can come from time to time and plant saplings and think they are protecting the environment. Now, getting up Mother Nature’s nose is never a good idea, her retribution is often nothing we can handle – these trees that they have planted, ecologists say, are not suitable for the Ridge. They are not native.

But to give the devil its due, perhaps, these sanctimonious do-gooders were true nature lovers, after all. Would they have stopped their 15 SUV cavalcades in the middle of a rainstorm to buy red roses from a drenched little girl? I think not but then why should they? I didn’t.