All-female rainforest force guarding India's rainforest

By: WE Staff | Wednesday, 3 November 2021

27 women act as guardians of the rare ferns, tree-hugging mosses and thousands of other plants at Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary, that may otherwise be lost forever.

“We are trying to salvage what is possible. It is like a refugee camp,” said Suprabha Seshan, one of the curators at the reserve.

“The intensive care units are in the posts and then when you take them out that’s like the general ward where they get other forms of primary health care,” Seshan added.

Because of global warming and human encroachment, in the hope of slowly repopulating the region with indigenous plants, Gurukula was created as a haven for the native flora struggling for survival.

50 years ago, Wolfgang Theuerkauf, a German conservationist set up Gurukula, which means a ‘retreat with a guru.

“Wolfgang said ‘this forest is our guru,” Seshan explained.

“We have between 30 and 40 per cent of the Western Ghats flora under conservation here,” added Seshan.

In 2012, the region won its part in UNESCO listing because it is one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, but the IUCN warned of the threat of encroaching human activity and habitat loss in its 2020 World Heritage Outlook report.

It said: “50 million people are estimated to live in the Western Ghats region, resulting in pressures that are orders of magnitude greater than many protected areas around the world.”

Seshan recalled: “When I came here plastic was still not a part of our culture. I remember when Wolfgang found the first plastic bag in the river, he said: ‘civilisation has arrived.”

Joseph, who has worked at the sanctuary for 25 years, says saving a rare species and seeing it live again in a forest is incredibly satisfying.

“They’re happy here, I am happy when they’re happy,” Joseph said of the plant.