In The Thar Desert, Trees Are Raised As Family

• An effort to revive wilting trees on a college campus has grown into a forestry initiative where households across Rajasthan adopt trees as kin

Anni Devi is beaming. At her home in Manafarsar, a village in north-western India’s Thar desert, the 82-year-old welcomes her grandson’s new wife as well as another new member of the household: an 18-inch sapling of jamun, the Indian blackberry.

The tree arrives draped in a red veil. The newlyweds carry it to the backyard, pour sacred water into the soil and press it into the sand, as relatives chant and scatter petals. “May you be prosperous and beget many fruits and children,” Devi says, blessing all three. The bride and the jamun join a growing “green family” – neem, guava, moringa, mulberry, Indian rosewood and Indian beech. Each planted on an auspicious day, each treated as kin.

Across 18,000 villages in the Thar, close to two million families are now raising what they call their “green sons and daughters”. The idea is simple: if a tree is adopted as a family member, it will not be abandoned.

The concept was seeded in the early 2000s by Shyam Sunder Jyani, a sociology professor who was trying to save a row of wilting neem trees on his college campus in the Bikaner district of Rajasthan state. What unsettled him when he set out to restore them, he says, was the indifference – “the apathy of the so-called ‘educated elite’” despite practicing rituals of tree and nature worship in their daily lives, Jyani tells Dialogue Earth.

So instead of framing his interventions as conservation, he began characterising them as familial. With students and villagers, Jyani created the first “green family”, linking saplings to households rather than to official programmes. The shift was cultural before it was ecological.

Two decades on, more than five million trees have been planted across over 4,000 hectares, in a concept known as familial forestry.

Hanuman Ram Chaudhary, the chief conservator of forests in Bikaner, says that when patches of familial forests are nurtured, they develop into sustainable, viable habitats for native species. “Familial forestry has also [significantly] contributed to the increase in ‘Trees Outside Forest’ area in the state,” Chaudhary tells Dialogue Earth, referring to trees planted outside all wooded areas.

Reports from the Forest Survey of India show that Rajasthan’s Trees Outside Forest area rose from 8,272 square kilometres in 2011 to 10,841 in 2023.

But statistics only tell part of the story. In pockets of the Thar, farmers and educators say the landscape feels different. There has been more green, more shade, and a shift in how communities relate to the land beneath their feet.

Reviving the land

“Familial forestry is about the holistic healing of ecosystems by nurturing their health and strengthening the interdependence between habitats, flora, fauna and local communities,” Jyani says.

A recipient of the 2021 Land for Life Award from the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, Jyani began the initiative in 2006 with 120 households in Himtasar village, near Bikaner city. Carrying the message of “one family, one tree”, he distributed native saplings: Indian mesquite, valued for its fodder and sangri pods; rohida (desert teak), prized for its durable wood; and fruit trees such as jujube.

Initially, the undertaking was met with scepticism. Many wondered how trees could grow on desert sand. “This was a myth we dispelled through the traditional wisdom of local elders in desert ecology,” Jyani explains, adding that he leant on the knowledge systems of village elders who helped identify native grasses and species suited to the terrain.

“These days we exploit nature and deplete her resources, but here was someone who wanted to replenish the earth by creating multiple green families,” says 67-year-old Bahadurmal Siddh, who became a key volunteer in the movement.

Siddh now oversees around seven acres of familial forest on community land. “The secret to rejuvenating such ecosystems lies in first establishing a perennial cover of drought-tolerant native grasses,” he explains. Grass species such as sewan, dhaman (buffel grass) and karad (marvel grass) bind the soil with fibrous roots, prevent erosion and conserve moisture. As they grow and decay, they enrich the soil, creating a good base for seeds and saplings.

“This culturally rooted, community-led model of sustainable conservation is restoring degraded desert land and native biodiversity, integrating environmental care with traditional practices and everyday life,” says Prabhu Dan Charan, assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science at Maharaja Ganga Singh University in Bikaner.

“We can now depend on agriculture as a sustainable source of livelihood,” says Onkarnath Yogi, a farmer from Lunkaransar village in Bikaner. “Simultaneously, the fruits, fodder and medicinal plants from our backyard… are supplementing our nutrition and wellbeing.”

Women’s participation

If familial forestry is reshaping the microclimate, it is also altering social realities, particularly for women long confined to the margins of public life.

Rajasthan has had a long history of gender inequality and the marginalisation of women, with customs such as child marriage and purdah (the veiling of women) still prevalent in many rural areas. “For [women], even visiting cremation grounds was a taboo,” said Kavita Jyani, a co-founder of the movement and spouse of Shyam Sundar.

She remembers arriving at a familial forestry programme in 2016 with her two daughters, to find not one other woman present. “But as we continued to participate, it encouraged other women to step out and begin breaking social barriers,” she tells Dialogue Earth.

The purpose of the movement, Kavita Jyani says, was not only to combat desertification, but also to address malnutrition, especially among women and children, and to enhance food security through planting of fruit trees.

Today, women lead rituals such as Familial Forestry Day on 4 August. Saplings are offered at Hindu temples, distributed as roonkh prasad – a blessed offering that households take home as a new family member. During Vriksh Raksha Bandhan – the green adaptation of the Hindu ritual, with vriksh meaning “tree” in Sanskrit – women tie sacred threads called rakhi around trees, which they would ordinarily bind around the wrists of their brothers, pledging lifelong protection.

These rituals have also built a funding base. Since 2019, around 100,000 volunteers have pledged to contribute one rupee every day under Roonkh Reet (“custom for saplings” in Marwari, a Rajasthani dialect). Through Lili Laag (“green responsibility”), families donate during festivals and significant occasions. Jyani notes that the movement has come a long way from its early days, when it relied largely on his salary and small contributions from friends.

The trees are grown on private farms and in courtyards, but also in schools and public institutions. The familial forestry initiative team work with the institutions to identify suitable land for the trees to be cultivated. Students, teachers and staff then adopt the trees, taking personal responsibility for their care as extended “family members”.

What began as just a few neem trees on Jyani’s six-hectare college campus has grown into the Gandhi Institutional Forest, which he estimates as formed of more than 3,000 trees spanning about 90 native and other species. Across the Thar, over 200 such institutional forests now stand, tended to by students and staff.

‘A paradise of nature’

Perhaps the most visible example of familial forestry can be found at Dabla Talab, an 84-hectare reservoir and catchment once ravaged by three decades of gypsum mining. The reservoir had dried up after mining cut 20 to 30 feet into its gypsum-rich basin, notes Bhagirath Motsara, a village elder from nearby Uttamdesar who is also involved in familial forestry. Dabla Talab is revered locally as the site where Baba Jasnath – a medieval saint whose followers, the Jasnathis, still live in the region – was found as a newborn.

In June 2022, Jyani, backed by the district administration and local communities, embarked on a 4,500-kilometre protest yatra (procession) against the mining ecosystem.

Two months later, with the support of villagers from surrounding areas, he began planting native vegetation around the reservoir. For this effort, “I received death threats through intimidatory calls and messages”, recalls Jyani. Local media reported that Jyani and key members of the movement were met with lawsuits from individuals accusing them of encroaching on the land, with the cases later dismissed by the court.

To expand the planting effort, Jyani enlisted the help of more than 100 villages surrounding Dabla Talab. The sacred site was fenced off, and a more intensive restoration began. Today, over 50 varieties of native plants and grasses grow across the revived landscape.

“Dabla today is a paradise of nature,” says Pratap Singh Kataria, head of the zoology department at Government Dungar College in Bikaner. Wildlife has returned: there are birds, jungle cats, as well as lizards and foxes. Dialogue Earth noted birds like long-billed vultures, Eurasian collared doves and peafowl circling above several restored waterholes. “The landscape now supports a complete web of life that sustains the thriving species,” Kataria notes.

To sustain the wider familial forestry movement, six public nurseries – each raising between 40,000 and 60,000 saplings – and 115 seasonal nurseries distribute trees free of cost. While most saplings are grown locally, some are sourced from government and private suppliers.

But challenges remain. Jyani points to the need for sustained funding, greater awareness, a steady supply of saplings as well as continued threats from mining interests.

Yet he measures success differently: “From conservation to conversation – where families dissolve differences over the exchange of saplings and share a sense of belonging.”

In the Thar, trees rise from the desert sand, growing in courtyards, besides wells and on community land. They have been carried tenderly, planted and raised as family.

(Published under Creative Commons from Dialogue Earth)