Bengaluru-based academician launches digital database of flora of India Premium

Dr. Sankara Rao has been fascinated by plants for as long as he can remember. “When someone scolded me at home, I would go sit on a guava tree, eat fruits and refuse to come home,” says Rao, who grew up in a densely vegetated part of Kakinada in East Godavari District, Andhra Pradesh. He remembers playing amidst the trees, jumping from branch to branch, spending so much time on them that when his father returned home from work and asked his mother about her son, her standard response would be that he was on a tree. “I think it is inborn,” says Rao, who is all set to launch India Flora Online, a digital database of the flora of India, the only such of its kind in the country. 

Dr. Sankara Rao has been fascinated by plants for as long as he can remember. “When someone scolded me at home, I would go sit on a guava tree, eat fruits and refuse to come home,” says Rao, who grew up in a densely vegetated part of Kakinada in East Godavari District, Andhra Pradesh. He remembers playing amidst the trees, jumping from branch to branch, spending so much time on them that when his father returned home from work and asked his mother about her son, her standard response would be that he was on a tree. “I think it is inborn,” says Rao, who is all set to launch India Flora Online, a digital database of the flora of India, the only such of its kind in the country. 

India Flora Online, which also includes a record of plants from Afghanistan, Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Pakistan, is the fourth such plant database initiative he has been instrumental in launching, following Digital Flora of Karnataka (2014), Digital Flora of Eastern Ghats (2019), and Flora of Peninsular India (2019). “I have been working day and night on this,” says Rao, pointing out that having an easily accessible resource such as this will offer people knowledge about every plant in the country. “This fulfils the country’s need to bring its plant wealth into one searchable source,” he believes. 

Rao, Visiting Professor and Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Ecological Sciences (CES), Indian Institute of Science (IISc), has been in charge of the herbarium at CES for around 17 years. It is his “post-retirement work,” he says. He took on the role after he retired from IISc’s Biochemistry Department in 2001, after working there for nearly 20 years. “Biochemistry is, after all, the functioning of the biological systems, a manifestation of life.” 

He spent the first three years after retirement as an Emeritus Professor before joining CES to take care of the department’s herbarium (a collection of plant samples preserved by drying and pressing for long-term study), incidentally one which he had been instrumental in starting decades ago. “I was one of the co-founders of the Herbarium JCB with Father Cecil Saldanha,” says Rao, recounting how the two began developing the collection at St. Joseph’s College in Bengaluru when they worked together in the 1960s and 70s.

Rao was already part of St. Joseph’s Botany Department when Father Saldanha joined it in 1964 after working at St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai (then Bombay). “He came with a specialisation in Botany and wanted to continue his research in it,” says Rao. He adds that Saldanha was looking for an associate who was also interested in plants and plant taxonomy when he arrived at St. Joseph’s. “He wanted someone with a similar thinking. He found one in me,” he says.

He recalls how the two of them would go on expeditions in and around Bengaluru every weekend, collecting all kinds of plants and even purchasing a used jeep that they used on these journeys. “In those days, the suburbs in Bangalore were all forest,” says Rao, pointing out that the Bannerghatta Forest used to start near the MICO factory back then. “Bannerghatta, which is in the southern part of the Deccan, was where we collected a lot of plants,” he says, remembering how they even encountered wild animals, especially bears, on these trips. “I used to spend much of my spare time with him (Father Saldhana),” he says. 

Cut to the year 1984. Father Saldanha, who had retired from St. Joseph’s at the age of 60, joined IISc, bringing his herbarium collection with him. “He was invited by Madhav Gadgil, the founder of the CES department,” says Rao. Sadly, Saldanha passed away less than two years after that, leaving behind this collection of around 16,000 specimens. “They did not know what to do with it, so they came to me,” says Rao, who took on the responsibility of managing the plant collection completely in 2007.