By Prajakta Hushangabadkar The road into Kanha National Park did not hurry. It curved through tall sal trees. Women walked home with bundles of firewood. Children waved at passing vehicles. Dust rose slowly and settled just as quietly. The villages seemed to grow from the land itself. Mud houses painted in blue color. Courtyards swept clean. Grain spread out to dry in the sun, an old lady was often seen shooing her chickens, a lazy dog and Life moved at its own pace. And in almost every house...

Grasslands and open forests (open natural ecosystems or ONEs) have been considered ‘wastelands’ since colonial times and targeted for restoration through tree planting. In this study, we use paleo-records to understand if Central India has a history of ONEs, and we find that the sites in our study region were often savanna in the last ten thousand years. This does upend the current understanding of the forests as a close canopy system that have recently been degraded into becoming an ONE....

1. How did your journey begin? What drew you to conservation work and when did you start? When I joined PRADAN in the year 2000, I was...