India’s Sacred Groves: Ancient Forests Protected & Conserved By Local Communities

Many cultures in India are well-known for their worship of nature, which plays an integral role in the lives of these communities. Religion and cultural practices are closely linked with forests, and this aids conservation. In many places, patches of forest are socially fenced by local populations and left untouched. These types of forests are regarded as Sacred Groves or Sacred Forests.

Home to diverse yet strongly practiced religions, India contains many Sacred Groves – more than 100,000 of them – as a result of the country’s high cultural, geographic, and ethnic diversity. The conservation practices used in these Groves vary by region and according to their nature, distribution, and local beliefs. They are particularly concentrated in the Western Ghats, central India, and north-eastern India.

The area of the Grove is usually dedicated to a local deity. Owing to this, communities tend to take responsibility to protect and nurture the area. It could be as small as only a few trees or as large as an entire forest. NGOs also play an important role in working with residents to keep these Groves safe, while their motives may be mostly restricted to ecological balance.

According to locally imposed protections, hunting and deforestation in these areas are banned but other activities with a more sustainable process such as honey and deadwood collection are permitted. The introduction of the Wildlife (Protection) Amendment Act in 2002 also secured government protection for these lands.

The value of these Groves is immense, as they become repositories of rich medicinal plants, wild relatives of crops, and many important species, which act altogether as a valuable gene pool. They have tremendous ecological and genetic significance, and play an important role in wildlife conservation as well.

Following modernisation and urbanisation, the beliefs people have in religious concepts are declining, in turn reducing the belief in the sanctity of these groves. However, people are also more cautious of the environment and, hopefully, that thought balances out the care given to these lands.

During the recent launch of her book “Commonwealth Forestry & Environmental History”, Prof. Vinita Damodaran of the University of Sussex made a reference to “Sacred Forests” or “Groves” in her presentation in the context of the history of forests.

We do not see mention of Sacred Forests very often, although they play an important role in preserving the forests ecosystem in India.

Practices to protect small patches of forest – believed to be the abode of gods – have also been observed on continents around the world (Bhagwat and Rutte, 2006). There are specific reports of Sacred Forests in Ghana, Nigeria, Syria, Turkey, and Japan (Kahn et al., 2008).

A large proportion of Sacred Forests are remnants of primary forests that have stayed intact. The composition of the vegetation of these Sacred Forests is generally a mixture of trees of different heights, including shrubs (low trees), herbs, climbing plants, and stranglers (Ficus aurea), with a lush coverage of fungi and ferns over the humic ground (Kerala Forest and Wildlife Department, 2009).

These Forests provide a variety of benefits. In those Forests that have been protected on the basis of religious beliefs and been handed over to successive generations, local communities have conserved a number of rare, endemic, or endangered species, many of which have the potential to provide medical, agricultural, and industrial benefits to humankind.

In recent years, tragically, Sacred Groves & Forests have been facing several social, cultural, and economic challenges resulting in reduction and fragmentation.

Scientists have suggested various measures for the conservation of Sacred Forests including legal and institutional reforms, as well as providing incentives to local communities for the sustainable conservation and management of these important forest areas.

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