South Bengal – Uttarayan Wildlife

SOUTH BENGAL ECOSYSTEM RESTORATION

PLANTATION BY UTTARAYAN WILDLIFE 2023

650 acres of plantation of key native species across Ranibund, Gorshika, Dhatala, Jhilimili, Sutaboi, Kechonda and Ajodhya covering degraded patches across elephant corridor in Bankura and Purulia. This started from 2022 and is a 5 yearlong project.

Before & after plantation - information from local community and stakeholders

ALTERNATIVE LIVELIHOOD

Training the local stakeholder committee involved in plantation on their land on how to maintain

UTTARAYAN WILDLIFE NURSERY

It’s a 6 acre nursery at Ranibund, Bankura for our project.

May 5, 2021

The world is on a precipice of unimaginable destruction due to several anthropogenic factors. The degradation of forests and landscapes is expected to worsen, as its drivers such as climate change, population growth and agricultural encroachment increasingly threaten our environment. Action is needed to halt environmental degradation, promote sustainable resource management, and restore the damage done https://www.wri.org/insights/nature-economic-winner-covid-19-recovery.

Globally more than 2 billion ha of forests and other land are degraded impacting 3.2 billion people because it directly threatens their food security or livelihoods. www.fao.org/state-of-forests/en/

World Environment Day 2022 celebrated at our project site in Bankura

We are working on Forest and Landscape restoration in a participatory mode of 1600 acres of degraded elephant corridor in South Bengal which is a hot-seat of elephant movement and conflict with the support of Rainmatter Foundation.

The nursery setup at Ranibund, Bankura

Plantation of ecological important species at Jamjuri, West Bengal, India.

Jamjuri is a place in Bankura district, West Bengal, where land is known for good fertility. It comes in Onda Block, which is a community development block (CD block) that forms an administrative division in the Bankura Sadar subdivision of the Bankura district in West Bengal, India.

In the Onda CD block in 2011, among the class of total workers, roughly 39.52% of the total population were agricultural workers.

In such a typical agricultural dominant area, some grew a manmade forest of Eucalyptus in an area of almost 20 hectare which has many ill effects like:

It induces soil degradation.
It is also considered responsible for declining groundwater.
It also decreases biodiversity as the plant is not palatable for any animals and it doesn’t allow lower storeyed hedges to grow.
Since its exotic and also fast growing, it easily outruns native species of ecological importance.
No agriculture can be done around since it has allelopathic effect .
Its leaves are very difficult to decompose so the soil underneath the plant gets unusable and lacks essential organic matter.

Uttarayan, visited those areas and discussed the negative consequences with the land owner, helped them with alternative ideas with high economic returns. Our team managed to convince them to shift from planting Eucalyptus to create a nursery after lot of soil reclamation process. As a result it gave economic stability to local people and provided empowerment to local tribal women as they started working in the nursery and even local children got aware of the biodiversity.

Before After

The land was unused.
Due to lack of shrubs underneath the area lacked any biodiversity including reptiles.
The place didn’t support any economic growth to local community.
Women in the village used to work only in their own households.
It is being used in nursery purpose.
The area has now good population of birds, butterflies, dragonflies and even snakes.
Almost 50 households are run by the income generated by working in the nursery.
Women are now empowered and are economical self-sufficient.

Contact Us

Uttarayan

Registered office : Chandur, Arambagh, Hooghly – 712602.

City Office : Merlin Infinite, DN 51, 12th Floor, Unit 1205, Sector V, Salt Lake City, Kolkata – 700091.

uttarayan@gmail.com