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Photo shows Van Vadi's stream-bed rainwater harvesting rock pool in peak monsoon (over 15 ft deep at the centre of the big water body). On either of the stream/rock-pool, are vegetable plots, which are irrigated in the post-monsoon months using the water, harvested here. And thickly forested areas (very high in biodiversity) are all around, covering most of the 64 acres. Organic food cropping is done on about 4 acres, including one acre of irrigated vegies and fruit.

Adivasis: Farming, Forest & Biodiversity in Use
While we were mainly thinking of planting fruits and vegetables, it was the adivasis who showed us that we could also grow on our undulating land – the gentler slopes – a variety of local millets like nacchni (ragi), varie, kangu; oilseeds like sesame, … And rice too – in low-lying, relatively flat, run-off beds at the mouth of minor streams, which required only a little more levelling and careful bunding to retain the rainwater needed by the rice plants.

We learnt from our adivasi workers that we have a number of potential small clearances for farming, presently under a predominance of shrubs like the uksi and the thorny karvanda. These could be cut and pushed back to form a dry, protective hedge to keep stray cattle out. Over the years, several such farming clearances, totalling almost 4 acres, were thus carved out.

We listed – with local, tribal help – over 115 naturally occurring and traditionally useful species, growing on our land. Of these, 80% figure in the compendium, ‘The Useful Plants of India’, with more detailed information available in ‘The Wealth of India’ – a multi-volume encylopaedia of natural inheritance. [We have compiled a thick box-file ‘The Botanical Wealth of Van Vadi’ – not half complete – which already has several hundred pages of printed (and hand-written) information on the plant species growing on our land, including their documented/ known uses.]

We discovered that we have over 35 ‘wild’ (uncultivated) food species that – in tribal knowledge – yield some edible part or parts (leaf, fruit, flower, stem, root), usually at a certain time of the year. Of these species, we identified the botanical names of almost 30 plants, and verified their use as food from ‘The Wealth of India’ and ‘Food from Forests’.

[If the above information is surprising, as it was to us, ‘The Gaia Atlas of Planet Management’ informs: “Of the estimated 80,000 edible plants (on this earth), only about 150 have been cultivated on a large scale, and less than 20 provide (now) 90 percent of our food.” However, even among our own tribals, more rooted to the land than most, the practice of consuming uncultivated forest foods is significantly declining – for several reasons.]

Food apart, we learnt that the land has more than 45 plant species documented to be of medicinal use; and at least 20 timber species, including four rated as ‘first grade timbers’. And then there are plants that yield natural dyes, soaps, oils (edible and non-edible), gums and resins, botanical pesticides, leaf plates, etc. (A number of species have multiple uses.)

The above is in addition to the more commonly sourced fodder, fuel, fibre, dry hedge (karavanda) cuttings, … not to mention rocks for building, seeds and seedlings for propagation, and the profusion of rich fertility resources like earthworm castings, arrested run-off topsoil (sedimented silt), leaf litter mulch, green manure, etc. to enhance the productivity of cultivated clearances. Moreover, the entire forested land functions like an enormous sponge to soak and store huge quantities of increasingly precious fresh water, while all the dense vegetative growth serves as a ‘sink’ for absorbing carbon dioxide, recycling it back into lung invigorating, pure oxygen.

Presently, if one follows a flock of birds flying eastward from Matheran to Bhimashankar, ours is perhaps the biggest and richest forest patch between the two. In ‘hard numbers’, the land has – at a rough, conservative estimate – more than forty thousand trees, excluding tall shrubs and tree-climbing vines. Of these, at least half are over twenty feet tall, including a quarter that are about twenty-five, or even thirty feet in height.

In summer, most of the trees (largely deciduous) are bereft of their green mantle. Several species, however, regain their leaves before the end of May – well before the rains arrive! A month earlier, the fresh, tender leaves on the Mahua trees are red, but soon metamorphose into a lush green. New, bright leaves sparkle too on all the young, and not-so-young, Palash trees. And then the land also has several evergreen species like jambul, karavanda, mango – fruiting abundantly ere the monsoon sets in.

The rich natural inheritance of the region sustained the adivasis for generations beyond count. Today, if there are any people left on this earth who can teach our floundering ‘millennium generation’ the fine art and science of co-existing in harmony with the forest, it is these tribals. Or rather, just a few among them now, who still retain the knowledge, the skills, and the native cultural perspective.

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