Once upon a time, there was a big banyan tree in Madurai. A very big tree. It’s called alamaram in Tamil. Birds lived in that tree, they chirped among its branches. Squirrels cavorted and frolicked. Its leaves rustled in the breeze. Beneath the tree, in the shade, there was a temple, the alamaram deity Muneeswaran. People prayed and worshipped. Under the tree, there was a tea stall; there was a tender coconut seller, and there was a bus stop. The tree took all in. All took to it.
Friends bantered in the shade, enemies smoothed over conflicts. In its vicinity and with its affinity, relationships spread out like its branches. Life flourished in, around, beneath and beyond the tree. Dhanapal Govindarajulu knows it. The tree was near his home. Dhanapal, who did his PhD on forest landscape restoration, reminiscences about it. The tree was the central point where people loved to meet each other and talk shop, where children played.
When the road expanded, the temple was moved away and the tree was cut down. All the things around it ceased to exist.
“It not only took away the shade available for the entire area but also cut off community,” he says. Now there is no sign that it existed sometime in the past. “So, the culture has also changed.”
A tree is not an individual; it is, by its very nature a collective. During childhood, all of us would have seen and played under large trees. But roads, highways, flyovers and real estate have destroyed tree cover in cities and towns. Villages too are under strain as pressures on land increase. And the poor always have less or no shade at all.
By felling the big trees, India's administration at all levels deprives poor people of whatever shade and succour they can get. While the rich and middle class have ACs, the poor have trees and their shade. Even the way shade is planned, it is overwhelmingly for the rich and the middle-class.
“Loss of trees affects vendors’ right to the city,” says this study, which assesses street vendors’ rights to trees in Hyderabad. By enclosing trees in public spaces, gentrification increases inequity, it adds.
After denuding the land of trees, urban planning in India goes in the other direction. As a part of increasing tree cover, speces like Polyalthia longifolia, also called Monoon longifolium and false Ashoka, are planted. Native to south India and Sri Lanka, it grows tall without spreading across. Non-native trees like the gulmohar and jacaranda are planted in Bengaluru. Some of them may give shade but they don’t give fruits that birds and bats eat.
Govindarajulu says we have to plant trees for shade as well as for biodiversity. The situation of farm trees, too, is distressing. A study which he co-authored points to severe depletion of mature trees in India. The authors of the paper mapped 0.6 billion farmland trees, excluding block plantations. Over the past decade, they found more than 10 per cent of large trees disappeared by 2018. During 2018-2022, more than 5 million farmland trees vanished.
Urban planning in our cities, too, does its own vanishing act with trees. He says it doesn’t take into account the room for trees to grow. There are no 100 ft roads where trees can be accommodated; instead, we have roads of 30 ft or so which, already narrow, don’t have room for trees. Without shade and with so many concrete buildings, Indian cities have created urban heat islands.
“That is why we have so much heat stress,” he says.
Current schemes to increase urban tree cover such as Nagar Van Yojana are still to show positive impacts on tree cover gain in cities. But there are a few ways to make trees part of our lives again. One is, he says, concentrated patches of forest.
“That gives the city a kind of lungs, a cooling space.” For example, in Chennai, defence establishments, Annie Besant Park, Indian Coach Factory, Government Railway Hospital in Perambur and Guindy national park have huge trees. Urban heat highlights the need for urban forests like Kancha Gachibowli in Hyderabad. These places have trees that are more than 100 years old.
The second way is having smaller forests or woods which one can walk to and where children can play. Those are the places, he suggests, where you can actually have large trees and mostly shade trees you can grow. Urban planning mandates that there should a park very close to home, within one or two kilometres.
In urban planning rules, apartment buildings should have at least 40 per cent of the area for open spaces and tree cover. But nobody follows that. In addition, trees should be planted along roads, beside nallas and streams, and wherever there is possible vacant land.
Govindarajulu says “instead of randomly planting trees that are not useful for ecology, we should plant native trees.” Trees that don’t require much water, can withstand heat and grow easily. Exotic, ornamental trees like Ficus benjamina and Polyalthia longifolia neither give shade nor food for birds and animals.
Trees are commons. A forest department tree officer must approve any removal and felling. Different cities have different procedures. One positive thing, he says, is that in some places, instead of killing old trees for road expansion or some such operation, they are being transplanted.
The loss of trees affects children in many ways. They have no memory of them because there are no trees. It’s a sad reality that many children wouldn’t have seen or heard about the national tree of India, the banyan.
Without trees and with the rise of smartphones, new habits of mind and body come into existence. While trees encourage more elemental human exchanges, more physical presence in meeting each other, smartphones mediate our humanity through screens, a more ephemeral interaction and engagement.
For the previous generation, a tree like the banyan was a physical presence, psychic anchor and spiritual totem. The tree near your home was part of your identity. While we move away from maddening crowds, trees find love and comfort in crowds. They are gregarious.
A tree is more than a physical thing; it’s a feeling. It’s more than a feeling; it’s an anchor, a solid ground you can latch on to when everything is in flux, safe harbour in wind-blasted storms and for thought-riven minds. It held us all under it, with it and within it. Few memories (and losses) can match this: that there was a tree. A very big tree.
Suggested Reading:
Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource by Sam Bloch, Random House, 2025, elaborates on the problems created by the lack of shade in large cities at a time when heat is becoming a peril to living organisms.
