Five hectares of hope: A forest reborn in SGNP

'Moth Lady' V Shubhalaxmi and her team took just 3 years to reforest five hectares of barren land in national park

- Sabah Virani

MUMBAI: From the heart of Mumbai's green lung, steadily depleted by human activity, comes a story of hope and renewal. "It's back to being a forest," says V Shubhalaxmi, of the five hectares she and her team have nursed back to life in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP).

Until four years ago, the land, at the Mulund edge of the national park, was barren. Like so many other areas in the 103-sq km national park, scarred by encroachments which includes thousands of slum dwellings, this portion too had been destroyed. It housed cricket pitches, a slum settlement, a small garbage dump, and had become a place where locals loitered as they came and went, at will, through a gap in the boundary wall.

Four years on, the canopy in this area is thriving and it's teeming with fauna — an unmistakable sign of nature's resilience and push towards survival.

"Most of the saplings we planted have survived," says Shubhalaxmi, better known as the 'Moth Lady' and founder of iNaturewatch Foundation (INW), a Mumbai-based non-profit and environmental consultancy firm.

Although she wrapped up the project a year ago, Shubhalaxmi visited the reforested area last week, just to check on it. The truth is, it keeps calling her back. "It's hard to describe how I feel, knowing we helped nature find her way back in," says Shubhalaxmi.

"I had approached the state Forest Department during the pandemic for a restoration project, as DCB Bank wanted to contribute its CSR funds. They offered this portion, in Khindipada," reveals Shubhalaxmi, an entomologist who worked with the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) in a senior capacity for 22 years.