He went to Rajasthan to make a film in 1994. Years later, filmmaker Pradip Krishen was restoring a 70-hectare desert landscape by removing an invasive tree and bringing native ecology back

In 1994, Pradip Krishen went to Pachmarhi in Madhya Pradesh to shoot a film. He could hardly have known that the trip would set him on a completely different path. While working on Electric Moon, Krishen began taking “Latin walks” with a neighbour who was a forester and knew trees by their scientific names. What started as a curiosity about plants gradually became a lifelong fascination with India's native trees, shrubs and landscapes. The report is sourced from Current Conservation and Scroll.

Years later, that interest would lead him to one of his most ambitious projects in Rajasthan: restoring the rocky landscape around Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur.

The challenge was unlike conventional tree planting. This was a 70-hectare landscape of exposed rhyolite rock with very little soil, where an invasive mesquite, Prosopis juliflora, had spread across the area. Krishen and his team had to learn almost everything through observation, experiments, careful notes and plenty of mistakes.

What does ecological restoration really mean?

For Krishen, restoration was never simply about putting trees into the ground.

“There is the whole question of people thinking of restoration as planting trees,” said Krishen. “Unfortunately, that’s the way it has been perceived, because that’s what governments do. And that is such a narrow perception of what restoration is.”

His approach was to understand what had naturally belonged in a landscape and then work with the conditions already present.

At Rao Jodha, that meant accepting that the rocky desert could not simply be turned into a forest. Krishen knew the plants had to be species capable of surviving there without constant watering.

“I knew, unless we can grow things that can grow here alone, there is no point,” said Krishen. “This is 70 hectares. We can’t go around watering it.” That principle shaped the project from the beginning.

How did Rao Jodha become a restoration experiment?

Work at the site began on April 1, 2006, after a nursery had been started about a month earlier. The team initially had access to only a small number of suitable species. Before the first rains arrived, they had managed to grow around 14 or 15 species.

Instead of attempting to transform the entire landscape immediately, they selected a small one-hectare area where mesquite was particularly dense. It became their practice ground, a place where they could make mistakes and learn.

Removing mesquite was itself a major challenge. Its roots pushed into cracks in the rock, and cutting the plant at ground level was not enough because it could regenerate from a budding zone beneath the surface.

The team relied on local stone-miners known as Khandwalias, whose knowledge of the rock helped them remove the mesquite more effectively.

The first three years became a long process of observation.

“I’d say the first three years were learning; learning by mistakes and learning by taking very, very careful notes.”

The team recorded planting locations, potting mixes, species and site conditions. They returned after six months and documented how individual plants were performing. When the information was reorganised by species, patterns began to emerge and survival rates improved.

Why did mesquite help them restore the landscape?

One of the strangest discoveries was that the invasive mesquite was also showing them where native plants could potentially survive.

Krishen explained that mesquite had already found the cracks and pockets where vegetation could establish itself. Instead of planting randomly across the rocky terrain, the team began following the places where mesquite had grown.

“It’s a pioneer for your planting. It told you where to plant.”

The team eventually decided to plant only in places where mesquite had demonstrated that growth was possible.

But mesquite itself was a serious ecological problem. Krishen described it as both pioneer and usurper because it could establish itself and then prevent other plants from growing around it.

Its seeds had been scattered from an airplane in the 1930s across an extensive part of the old kingdom of Jodhpur. Once established, the plant could form dense stands and release alkaloids into the root zone, discouraging other vegetation.

What did the rocks reveal about desert plants?

The landscape taught Krishen and his team another important lesson: plants did not necessarily need deep soil or deep roots to survive.

The park sits on rhyolite, a volcanic rock that generally has little or no topsoil. Plants adapted to this environment instead exploit cracks and fissures.

Krishen was particularly struck by the structure of Euphorbia caducifolia, or thor. Its thin, fibrous roots spread through cracks rather than simply growing deep into the ground.

The cracks could collect soil, protect it from wind and sunlight and preserve moisture. In May, the team found moist sand several feet inside hairline cracks in rocks.

That understanding changed the way they looked at the landscape.

They began dusting some bare rocky hillocks with heavier clayey soil, helping it enter tiny cracks and accelerating a process that would naturally occur through wind.

The restoration eventually included more than 100 planted species, with the broader inventory reaching between 170 and 190 species when grasses and smaller plants were included.

For Krishen, grasses now represent one of the most exciting possibilities for the park because of their textures and the way they can grow collectively along trails.

His journey from filmmaker to ecological restoration practitioner was built on the same principle that shaped Rao Jodha: observe first, understand the landscape and then work with it rather than forcing it to become something else.

After years of fieldwork, Krishen says he has deliberately stepped away from that work because he is now 75 and wants to concentrate on writing. Yet the restoration project continues to reflect the lessons he gathered through years of observation, experimentation and exploration.

The story that began with a filmmaker taking tree-spotting walks eventually became a much larger attempt to understand and restore a difficult desert ecosystem, one plant, crack and patch of rocky ground at a time.

FAQs

What inspired Pradip Krishen’s interest in trees?
His tree-spotting walks with a forester in Pachmarhi sparked his journey.

How large is Rao Jodha Desert Rock Park?
The restoration project covers 70 hectares around Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur.