These villagers are our real earth heroes. You may not hear of them, or see them on television channels receiving accolades for what they have done. But, listening to their stories of bringing a forest back to life was a truly humbling experience and for me a personal reality check on how marginalised rural and indigenous people in our country, are able to do the most extra-ordinary things. We were in village Mundhiari, in the eastern part of Gujarat in Vadodara district, about an hour’s drive from Vadodara.

It was in 1990 when Gandhian Harivallabhai Parikh appealed to the villagers in this area to protect their forests. It was no easy task for the 18 villages who decided to take this on. According to the villagers, the forests were destroyed earlier by the State government’s policy of clear-felling forests and making way for plantations. When the community in village Mundhiari decided to take on forest protection to regenerate the forests, they formed a committee, the Mundhiari Sahayogi Van Vikas Mandli.

The reactions from the forest department were initially unsupportive, even hostile. The department, they alleged, in fact tried to break the co-operation of the villages, saying that their efforts of protecting the forests would not get them any benefits. But the community persisted.

Two decades later, things are very different. Regular patrolling of the area by four teams of 15 villagers each, has allowed large patches of forests to regenerate. Today, Mundhiari protects 432 hectares, and neighbouring Haathipagla and Narvaniya about 482 hectares and 700 hectares respectively.

The villagers report that there is now more water in their wells and that their streams flow for longer periods of time. They are able to collect not only fuelwood from the forests, but also medicinal herbs, lac, mahua flowers and seeds, and fruit. The regeneration of the forests coupled with the fact that there has been significantly reduced poaching in the area for the last 20 years has meant that the forests now support increasing populations of leopard, porcupine, hare, langur, wild pig, bear, nilgai, and some deer species. One of the elderly men insisted that he had seen a tiger in the area very recently. He emphatically stated that he had not mistaken a leopard for a tiger, and had seen the striped markings on the animal’s body. If this be true, then it would create a buzz around wildlife circles, as the 2001 tiger census showed no tigers in Gujarat.