Ranaram Bishnoi- The 75 year Old who Stopped the March of the Desert

The Story first appeared in the Bangkok Post. (Jan 2014)

Ekalkhori village is about 100 kms from Jodhpur  but it takes us more than five hours  to get there.   The light is fading fast but in this Bishnoi territory in Rajasthan, the driver has to make innumerable halts as the chinkaras, the black bucks, the squirrels drift languorously on the highway.

We have in the back seat a volunteer of the Bishnoi Tiger Force– a wildlife vigilante group in Jodhpur district; a  menace of any poacher prowler in these part.  He gives us the  low-down on the daring animal rescues the force undertakes,  battling  gun wielding poachers in the dead of night.

He also fills us in  on the man from whom we are making this  backbreaking journey  across the arid Rajasthan plains. But there is nothing that prepares you  for the septuagenarian environment crusader.

Ranaram Bishnoi is a tall handsome man in his mid 70’s who takes his sobriquet of the ‘’tree man’’ rather seriously.

No sooner  we exchange greetings than he whisks us to the  desert  swathe where he’s planted over 27 thousand trees turning it green.  He has singlehandedly stopped the march of the desert, which left to itself would have   muzzled up the farmlands adjoining it and beyond.  The desert dunes now lie tamed and  anchored to the roots of Ranaram’s trees.  The indigenous trees he has planted are Neem, Rohida, Kankeri, Khejri, Fig, Bougainvillea and Babool.

Ranaram has been planting these trees for some years now,  drawing water  from a nearby well  and carrying it in an earthen pot on his shoulders to water the saplings.

The Bishnoi community to which Ranaram belongs is  the   forbearer of the Chipko movement, famous of its non-violent tree-hugging protest against tree felling. In 1730 , 363  Bishnoi men, women and children were killed by a local king’s soldiers  when they protested in this manner.

With such exemplars of environmental crusades  before them, the Bishnoi’s are driven to preserve and emulate  their ancestor’s legacy. Besides Rajasthan, the Bishnoi’s are found in pockets of Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh and they practice their strict credo for wildlife and environmental protection everywhere.  They have 29 tenants as laid down to them by their Guru Jambheshwar, out of which 8 pertain to protecting and respecting wildlife and environment.

Bollywood actor Salman Khan had come in their crosshair in 1998 when he  shot dead a black buck in a Jodhpur village during the filming of one  of his films. The Bishnoi’s  not only gave chase but insured that the actor  was booked and he  still faces charges for the crime in a Jodhpur court.

We climb the high dune  behind Ranaram just in time to catch the saplings in the orange light of the setting sun.

Standing at this elevation, overlooking the fields and the villages beyond, you get a sense of Ranaram’s immense contribution.   You also get a sense of his fortitude in planting saplings in the sand and watering them each day to breath life into them as it were. At his age his relentless war against the tide of the desert is indeed commendable.

But Ranaram is unassumingly honest, “ It was for environment of course  but it was also for my self-interest. My field is just under this dune and had I not planted these trees my field would have been the first to be consumed”, says Ranaram.

It is this honesty that defines him and it’s his simple, unstudied idea of ecology that endears you to him; “The plants, and the animals were on the planet much before we landed here. They have more rights on the planet than us and if we cannot give that to them at least we can insure we don’t destroy them in our greed”, he says.

His loose white shirt and dhoti- the attire of an average  Bishnoi-  flutters in the desert wind as he   moves over the tree dotted dunes with the pride of a patriarch. He stoops with childlike enthusiasm to show you evidence of birds adopting his trees for nesting and shelter. And then strides fast across the sands to show you the latest saplings he planted.

He hems in all the fresh saplings with dried thorn bushes to prevent cattle or wildlife  from eating them  up. But it is man, he  says who is the  biggest danger to the trees. “ There is no end to our greed but we must realize that without these plants and animals we just cannot survive”, he says.

There are no thorn bushes or fences that can keep a man away from destroying the  ecology he says. Only some awareness,  he says can help.

This article is copied from here