Efforts brew to revive ‘green deserts’ in southern India’s tea country

Environmentalists say industrial-scale tea farming has destroyed the soil’s nutrients and led to conflict with animals.

Scattered groves of native trees, flowers and the occasional prehistoric burial ground are squeezed between hundreds of thousands of tea shrubs in southern India’s Nilgiris region – a gateway to a time before colonisation and the commercial growing of tea that reshaped the country’s mountain landscapes.

These sacred groves once blanketed the Western Ghats mountains, but nearly 200 years ago, British colonialists installed rows upon rows of tea plantations. The few groves that stand today are either protected by Indigenous communities who preserve them for their faith and traditions, or are being grown and tended back into existence by ecologists who remove tea trees from disused farms and plant seeds native to this biodiverse region.

It takes decades, but their efforts are finally starting to see results as forests flourish despite ecological damage and wilder weather caused by climate change.

The teams bringing back the forests – home to more than 600 native plants and 150 animal species found only here – know that they still need to work around their neighbours. Nearly everyone in the region’s more than 700,000-strong population either farms black, green and white tea or works with the almost three million tourists who come to escape the searing heat of the Indian plains.

Environmentalists say industrial-scale tea farming has destroyed the soil’s nutrients and led to conflict with animals like elephants and gaur, or Indian bison, that have little forest left to live in.