'Magic in her hands.' The woman bringing India's forests back to life

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‘Magic in her hands.’ The woman bringing India’s forests back to life


Sep. 3, 2022 at 8:05 pm Updated Sep. 3, 2022 at 8:39 pm

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Tulsi Gowind Gowda, who has devoted her life to transforming vast swaths of barren land into dense forests, works at a government nursery in Karnataka, her home state in southern India, May 22, 2022. Last year, the government recognized Gowda for her efforts at forest conservation, and her vast knowledge of ecosystems, with the Padma Shri award, one of India’s highest civilian honors. (Priyadarshini Ravichandran/The New York Times) XNYT20 XNYT20 (PRIYADARSHINI RAVICHANDRAN / NYT)
The Padma Shri award, India’s fourth-highest civilian honor, which Tulsi Gowind Gowda received last year, at her home in Honnali, a village in the southern state of Karnataka, May 22, 2022. The government recognized Gowda for her efforts at forest conservation and her vast knowledge of ecosystems. (Priyadarshini Ravichandran/The New York Times) XNYT23 XNYT23 (PRIYADARSHINI RAVICHANDRAN / NYT)

HONNALI, India — She has walked for miles, deep into tropical rainforests, carefully cutting healthy branches from hundreds of trees and replanting and grafting them. Her eyes light up when she talks about rare seeds or a sapling. And when she dies, she would like to be reborn, she said, as a big tree. Tulsi Gowind Gowda — who doesn’t know the year of her birth but believes she is older than 80 — has devoted her life to transforming vast swaths of barren land in her native state of Karnataka, in southern India, into dense forests. Over the years, she has received around a dozen prizes for her pioneering conservation work. But the most prestigious came last year, when the government recognized her efforts and her vast knowledge of forest ecosystems with the Padma Shri award, one of the country’s highest civilian honors. On a recent morning, Gowda sat in a plastic chair welcoming visitors to her three-room home in Honnali, a village of about 150 houses at the edge of a forest. She wore a backless sari, designed to make physical labor easier, and six layers of beads around her neck made of stones and natural fiber. Behind her, a wall-mounted showcase was filled with pictures and plastic sculptures of Hindu deities and photographs of her award ceremonies.

Winning the Padma Shri award, India’s fourth highest civilian honor, brought Gowda unaccustomed attention, with its extensive coverage in the Indian press. When villagers see her these days, they bow down, and children stop to take selfies with her. Busloads of students arrive at her home, where she lives with 10 members of her family, including her great-grandchildren. “When I see them, I feel happy,” she said, referring to the students, in an interview. They need to be taught how important it is to plant trees, she said.

When India was under British rule, the colonizers led a huge deforestation drive in the mountains to strip wood to make ships and lay railway tracks, wiping out much of the forest cover of the Uttara Kannada district, where Gowda lives. After India’s independence in 1947, the country’s leaders continued to exploit forest areas for large-scale industrialization and urbanization. Between 1951 and 1980, around 4.2 million hectares of land, or about 10.4 million acres, was devoted to developmental projects, according to government figures.

Even as a child, Gowda, who never learned to read, worked to reverse the stripping of local forests by replanting trees. During daylong trips to forests to collect firewood for the family, her mother taught her how regeneration is best done with seeds from big, healthy trees. When she was a teenager, she turned a gutted landscape behind her family house into a dense forest, local residents and Indian officials say. “Since her childhood, she spoke to trees like a mother would speak to her infant children,” said Rukmani, a local woman who uses only one name and has worked with Gowda for decades.


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Gowda said that as she has turned frail recently, she often thinks about death and dying. “The best death would be under the shade of a big tree with huge branches,” she said. “I like them more than anything else in my life.”

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