Restoring the breathing hillocks of Bundelkhand, Madhya Pradesh

The Hillocks Are Still Breathing

A Story of Land, Memory, and What We Owe the Future

Restoration of Community Hillocks — Chhatarpur, Panna, Katni & Damoh, Madhya Pradesh

There is a particular hour — just before the monsoon breaks over Bundelkhand — when the hillocks glow. The granite outcrops catch the last light of a pre-storm sky and the teak trees, few as they now are, hold themselves very still. In that moment, if you are standing inside one of these hills — in Panna, or Chhatarpur, or on the ravine edges of Damoh — you can almost feel what this land once was. You can hear it remembering itself.

I have stood in that hour. And I have also stood in the silence that comes after — when the rain arrives not with abundance but with violence, tearing across bare, eroded slopes, carrying the topsoil of centuries into nala beds already choked with sediment. The trees are not there to slow it down. The roots are not there to hold the water in. The springs that once ran through October have been dry since July.

This is what degradation looks like — not dramatic, not cinematic, but slow and heartbreaking. And this is why we are here.

The Land We Are Fighting For

Bundelkhand is one of India's most storied and least understood landscapes. Geologically ancient — its granite hillocks formed nearly a billion years ago — this region in central Madhya Pradesh was once a belt of thick tropical dry deciduous forests, where sal and teak grew in dense company with mahua, tendu, palash, and khair. The Gond and Kol tribal communities who have lived here for generations built their entire economy, medicine, food culture, and spiritual life from these trees. The mahua flower fed their children. The tendu leaf gave them their most reliable income. The palash bloomed red every spring as a calendar they didn't need paper for.

Across four districts — Chhatarpur, Panna, Katni, and Damoh — the community hillocks that anchor this ecosystem are now in distress. Decades of over-extraction, uncontrolled grazing through the practice of anna pratha, and the steady encroachment of limestone and coal mining operations have reduced forest canopy from lush cover to bare patches of 10 to 40 percent. The wells are falling. The groundwater table has dropped 40 to 60 metres deep. Women in some villages now walk four hours a day to collect fuelwood that was once 20 minutes away.

Even as infrastructure projects reshape the rivers — and communities like the Gond and Kol of Bijawar tehsil make extraordinary sacrifices to assert their right to remain — these hillocks sit at the quieter edge of crisis. No dramatic protest captures their disappearance. They degrade silently, season by season, slope by slope.

But they are still breathing. And that is why this moment is the one that matters.

What We Are Doing — and Why It Is Different

The Hillocks Restoration Initiative, led by the Ikaya Earth proposes to restore 800 to 1,000 hectares of degraded community hillocks across these four districts through a method that is as old as the forest itself: community-led, nature-guided, and patient.

We will plant a million native saplings — not a monoculture, but a living mosaic of 40-plus species across every layer of the forest, from the tall teak and sal of the canopy to the mahua and tendu of the middle story, the vitamin-rich aonla and drought-hardy ber closer to the ground, bamboo on the slopes, and medicinal herbs woven through the understorey. Every species selected has a role in the ecology and an income in the household. These are not ornamental trees. They are livelihoods.

Alongside the planting, we will build what the hillocks need to survive the increasingly brutal summers: nala bunds to slow the runoff, check dams to capture the rain that does fall, percolation tanks to push that water back underground, and farm ponds to stretch its use across the dry season. These are not engineering interventions. They are acts of restoration — giving back to the soil its capacity to hold what the sky offers.

But the most important work is not in the pits or the percolation tanks. It is in the Gram Sabhas.

The Community at the Centre

No tree planted by an outsider survives in Bundelkhand. The land knows. Experience from Forest Landscape Restoration across South Asia tells us that community-managed landscapes achieve 70 to 80 percent sapling survival — far beyond what any government tender or contract plantation achieves. The reason is simple: when the forest belongs to you, you protect it.

This project will establish 50 Eco-Development Committees — democratically elected, 50 percent women-led, with reserved seats for Scheduled Tribe and Scheduled Caste members — in 76 to 92 villages across the four districts. These are not project committees that dissolve when our team leaves. They will have written constitutions, registered bank accounts, transparent benefit-sharing agreements, and the legal backing of the Forest Department. They will be the governance structure of the restored hillocks for decades to come.

Alongside these committees, we will establish Self-Help Groups — 100 groups, all women — who will run the nurseries that grow the saplings, process the aonla into medicinal products, extract mahua oil for the market, and weave bamboo into crafts that carry the forest's story into living rooms far from these hillocks. The forest's recovery becomes their income. Their income becomes the forest's protection. That is the loop we are building.

What Your Support Makes Possible

The funds we are seeking — 1 Million Dollars — funds the planting of a million saplings at 1 Dollar per sapling. That cost covers the sapling's journey from seed collection in native forests to its first year in the ground: the pit, the vermicompost, the labor, the mulch, the care, and the community watch that stands guard against a wayward goat or an early-summer fire.

One Dollar per sapling. That is what it costs to begin the restoration of a species that will live for 80 years, sequester tonnes of carbon, anchor a hillside against erosion, refill a well, and feed a family's children with its fruit.

This investment acts as catalytic capital, unlocking convergence with government programs — MGNREGA for wage employment, Green India Mission for plantation targets, PMKSY for water structures — to the tune of 3-4 Million USD. Your million does not work alone. It activates a system.

Over 10 years, this project will generate 0.1 million person-days of employment, establish 15 to 20 micro-enterprises, sequester 1.2 to 1.8 million tonnes of carbon, and bring groundwater within reach of communities who have been watching their wells run dry for two decades. It will do this without displacing a single family, without clearing a single additional patch of land, and without importing a single tree species that does not already belong here.

The Honest Challenge

We will not pretend this work is easy. Bundelkhand has a long history of well-intentioned projects that planted trees and walked away. The anna pratha — the practice of free-roaming livestock — is deeply culturally embedded, and negotiating grazing rules with communities requires trust that takes months to build. The erratic rainfall means that the first year after planting is always a survival test. Climate extremes are intensifying: the summer of 2022 brought temperatures above 47 degrees Celsius to these districts, and saplings that had survived their first monsoon wilted in March.

We mitigate these risks with species diversity — no single drought can wipe out a 40-species palette — with soil moisture structures that build resilience, with community institutions strong enough to adapt when conditions change, and with honest monitoring that tells us when something is not working so we can change course before it is too late.

We are not promising a perfect forest in 10 years. We are promising a living one.

What We Are Really Asking

The hillocks of Bundelkhand do not make the news. They are not the tigers of Panna or the diamonds of Chhatarpur or the temples of Khajuraho. They are the unremarkable granite shoulders of a landscape that has held civilisations — Chandela kings built their water harvesting systems here; Gond communities mapped their medicine here; generations of Bundeli farmers timed their harvests by the bloom of the palash.

What we are asking is not charity. It is partnership in an act of memory. The memory of what these hillocks were, carried forward by the communities who still live with them, expressed through the planting of trees that will outlive all of us.

Ecosystems, once broken past a threshold, do not recover on their own. But these hillocks have not crossed that threshold yet. The rootstock is still in the soil. The seed trees are still standing — fewer, thinner, but standing. The women who know which bark is medicine and which leaf is edible are still here, still willing to teach.

There is a window. It is open right now. A million saplings in the ground, 50 communities with the authority and the means to protect them, and the slow, patient work of letting a landscape remember what it once knew how to be.