There is a vulture in this story. You will not see her. There used to be tens of millions of vultures of her kind across the Indian subcontinent. There are now in the low tens of thousands. She is, in the most literal sense, a survivor.
You did not read about her in the newspaper this week. Vultures do not trend.
This is a piece about everything else in India that does not trend, and the long quiet reason it matters that it does not.
What we are told
The official numbers, the ones our environment ministry repeats at international summits, are friendly numbers.
Forest cover is up. The India State of Forest Report, published every two years by the Forest Survey of India, says forest and tree cover combined is now over twenty-four percent of the country’s land area. Tigers are up. The 2022 census put the count at three thousand one hundred and sixty-seven, the highest figure on record.
These numbers are real. They are also, in the way of all friendly numbers, only part of the story.
What gets quietly counted as forest
The forest cover figure includes plantations. Eucalyptus, rubber, oil palm, commercial timber, even tea estates above a certain canopy density. A row of thirty-year-old commercial eucalyptus is, in the official accounting, the same green pixel on a satellite map as a primary sal forest in Chhattisgarh that has stood for ten thousand years.
A plantation is a stack of one species. A forest is a community of thousands. They are the same on a balance sheet and entirely different on the ground. One holds water, supports insects, feeds birds, hosts bears, regulates regional rainfall, cools the climate, and stores carbon for centuries. The other does the carbon part, partly, until it is harvested.
By the most conservative reading of the same satellite data, India’s actual natural forest has been declining for at least three decades. The official cover number rises because plantations rise faster than forests fall. We have learned to keep score by changing the scoreboard.
What we do not count at all
The numbers we have stopped collecting are the ones that would tell us the truth.
We do not have a national insect count. There is no Indian equivalent of the German Krefeld study that found a seventy-five percent decline in flying insect biomass over twenty-seven years. If pollinators are collapsing in India, we will discover it from the price of vegetables before we discover it from a paper.
We do not seriously count vultures any more, though we know what happened to them. Diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug given to cattle, killed off about ninety-nine percent of three Indian vulture species between the early 1990s and the mid 2000s. A 2024 paper by Frank and Sudarshan in the American Economic Review estimated that the cascading effects of the vulture collapse, mostly through rotting carcasses and the explosion in feral dog populations that followed, contributed to roughly half a million additional human deaths in India between 2000 and 2005 alone. The drug was banned for veterinary use in 2006. The vultures have not come back.
We do not count river dolphins well. The Ganges river dolphin, India’s national aquatic animal, is endangered. The Indus dolphin, formally classified as a separate species in 2021, has only a handful of individuals left in Indian waters.
We do not count the small things at all. Frogs. Fireflies. Sparrows in cities. The native grasses that hold the topsoil. The species dying are the species below the level of newspaper coverage.
Three places, this week
In Hasdeo Aranya, in northern Chhattisgarh, one of the largest contiguous stretches of dense sal forest left in central India, coal blocks are being opened on land where Adivasi communities have lived for centuries. The forest holds elephants, bears, leopards, and the headwaters of small rivers. It also holds coal. The coal is winning.
In Great Nicobar Island, far to the southeast, government documents refer to the clearing of approximately eight hundred and fifty-two thousand trees for a transshipment port and military and tourism infrastructure. The island is one of the last places in India where a primary tropical rainforest meets the sea. The Shompen people who live there are among the most isolated communities on Earth.
In the Aravalli range, which is meant by climate to be a barrier slowing the desert from crossing into north India, illegal mining and encroachment have continued for forty years, despite repeated Supreme Court orders. The range is shorter, lower, and thinner with every decade.
These are not the only places. They are this week’s places.
Why this gets no airtime
A felled forest does not make a good panel show. There are no two faces to put on a split screen. There is no slogan you can chant in seven seconds. The villain is diffuse. A mining company, a state government, a central ministry, a contractor, a buyer in another country. The victims do not vote in numbers that matter to a national broadcaster.
So the news machine, which we now know runs on tribes and outrage, has nothing to sell. So the forest disappears in the way large slow things disappear, on the back pages, and then on no pages.
By the time the reader notices, the forest is a memory and the mining lease is a fact.
The bill arrives later
A forest does not just hold trees. It holds the water table for the wells in the next three districts. It cools the local climate by several degrees. It feeds the rivers in the dry season. It traps the silt that would otherwise choke the dam downstream. It holds back the dust that would land on the fields a hundred kilometres east. It pollinates the orchards in the next state.
When you remove the forest, the bill for those services arrives slowly. The well runs dry in year four. The crop yields fall in year seven. The dam silts up in year fifteen. Nobody connects the bill to the loss.
A country can lose a forest and not feel it for a decade. It cannot lose a forest and not pay for it.
What you can do
Three things, in order of how much they cost you.
First, learn the name of one tree in your neighbourhood. Then a second. The mind that knows the name of a peepul, a neem, a gulmohar, an arjun, treats the loss of one differently than the mind that sees only “trees.” This is how attention is trained.
Second, look up the most recent India State of Forest Report. It is a free PDF on the Forest Survey of India website. Read the chapter on your own state. You will find numbers you have never seen on television, and a couple of numbers that should make you ask better questions.
Third, find one organisation doing the slow, unglamorous work of monitoring or restoring a specific forest, river, or species. The Wildlife Trust of India. The Foundation for Ecological Security. ATREE. The Bombay Natural History Society. They are not angry. They are counting. Send them a thousand rupees, or an hour of your time.
The forest does not need you to save it. It needs you to count it. Once we are counting it again, the saving will follow.
