Dehradun: A tale of lost trees and broken promises

Ruskin Bond wrote in his 1991 essay—and eponymous book—that Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra. Saddened by what creeping modernisation was doing to the idyllic Dehradun of his youth—the town of “green hedges and grey heads”—he clung to the faint hope offered by surviving old trees: these trees, hoped Mr Bond, would preserve the past, be repositories of memory in the face of indiscriminate development.

The wise chronicler of the Mussoorie hills was only consoling himself. Even in the nineties, when I returned to the paths where I had cycled as a careless schoolboy in the sixties, the degradation had begun. The capacious Dalanwala bungalows, with their litchi gardens and brooding jackfruit and mango trees were being cut up, sold, built up one by one. The rice fields were shrinking. The East Canal which rushed clean mountain water along the road named after it was covered up with concrete slabs. The green spaces of Race Course, where schoolboys used to play cricket, football and hockey, were hardly visible anymore. Yes, there were still some trees: the meditative pine grove near the cantonment, the sharp-smelling eucalyptus lining the avenues, the sal and shisham forests of the Siwaliks, the buffer woods of Rajpur and Raipur.

Then came the vengeful curse on Dehradun: “You have been beauteous long enough. Now you shall perish: you will commit suicide through flattery.” Dehradun was made the capital of a new state, a burden that it was ill-suited for. In the ensuing years, its face has been badly scarred, its character irretrievably eroded. The population has doubled, rampant construction has boomed, ground water sources have shrunk, the air quality has deteriorated and its wildlife corridors fragmented. Its narrow leafy roads, where once the tonga was king, are now clogged with insufferable vehicular traffic. A new highway, with brand new potholes, brings more and more tourists to the edge of the valley in two and a half hours from Delhi; often it takes them as much time to travel the last ten miles within the valley.

Ironically for a town that is host to the Forest Research Institute and the Wildlife Institute of India, many recent “development” projects—widening of roads, expressways, riverbed development, railway infrastructure—have been accompanied by the indiscriminate felling of thousands of mature trees. There is clear evidence, if any were needed, of development without planning, growth without sustainability.

Fortunately, Dehradun (and Uttarakhand) knows something about ecological activism. Half a century ago, during the Chipko movement, hill women embraced tree trunks to save them; they understood what official forestry had forgotten: forests were not just timber for sale but sources of water, soil and life itself. Strong protests in the eighties, followed by a Supreme Court decision, halted the rapacious limestone quarrying in the Mussoorie-Dehradun hills.

The recent protests, built around public interest litigation, social media campaigns and scientific assessments by former foresters, have had mixed success. But they did result in creating more wildlife underpasses in the controversial Delhi-Dehradun expressway which cuts through elephant corridors and is inexplicably anchored in a mountain riverbed. The planned cutting of 4,000 trees for the Dehradun-Rishikesh highway has also been mercifully paused.

All this may be too-little too-late unless it leads to deep introspection. Do we really need wider roads in fragile mountains? More cars? Less water? Why rush more people to destinations that cannot sustain them? How long is 80 years, the time taken for a sal tree to mature fully? Is compensatory afforestation effective? Or just meretricious greenwash?

Let’s answer these questions honestly. Or else, read Bond’s essay as a bitter satire.

The author was India’s high commissioner to the UK and ambassador to the United States.