Amidst big Bollywood celebrities and dignitaries, a barefoot activist Tulsi Gowda, walked into Rashtrapati Bhawan to receive India’s highest civilian award, the Padma Bhushan. As a native of Karnataka’s Honnali hamlet, she had planted around 30,000 seedlings.
The entire media fraternity captured Tulsi with a lot of pride as she walked holding her head high, only to pause momentarily to greet Prime Minister Narendra Modi before proceeding to take her award.
Though eighty-three-year-old Tulsi Gowda is an illiterate, she was one of 61 people who was in the capital city of India to take the prestigious award.
In the last 50 years, Tulsi Gowda has worked at the forest department’s nursery in Honnalli village in Karnataka, where she has planted hundreds of thousands of trees and helped regenerate many indigenous varieties
Tulsi is considered as the forest encyclopaedia that belongs to the Gowda family. Her life revolved for half a century on the saplings she fostered at the forest department’s Agasur nursery in the Mastikatta range near Honnalli village in Karnataka’s Uttara Kannada district as part of their ongoing afforestation activities. She has effortlessly put that behind her to be the loving grandmother to her three young great-grandchildren. It has been12 years now that she has retired from her forest department work. Despite her retirement, she still works to conserve nature and tries her best to protect the tress.
Tulasi has unparalleled knowledge of silviculture of the Indian forest and trees which won this barefoot ecologist the Indira Priyadarshini Vrukshamitra Award in 1986 and Kannada Rajyotsava Award in 1999. More than a dozen awards and recognition later, the Padma Shri has come as value addition.
Forest nurseries are like children to Tulsi Gowda, as evidenced by the way she looks after the seedlings.
Picture of the Day 🙏🏻#PadmaAwards #PeoplesPadma #NewIndia 🇮🇳 pic.twitter.com/MduYMy60Up
— Rajeev Chandrasekhar 🇮🇳(Modiyude Kutumbam) (@Rajeev_GoI) November 8, 2021
“We used to grow eucalyptus, saguwani (Tectona grandis), sheesham (Dalbergia latifolia), honne (Pterocarpus marsupium), mathi (Terminalia elliptica), and other plants when I first started working in the department. I’ve also planted mangoes and jackfruit.”says Tulsi with a lot of enthusiasm
Her father died when she was barely two years old. As she was born into an impoverished family, her mother took her to a local nursery where she was employed. Tulsi gathered a lot of knowledge with her mother from that nursery. Due to abject poverty, Tulasi’s mother could not afford to send her to school. When she was a teenager, she was married in that same village.
Though she was married, her connect with the nature didn’t die. She continuously worked in that nursery, planting many saplings. Tulsi’s worth was recognised and was presented to the world after the retired IFS officer, Yellappa Reddy noticed her potential “I met Tulasi Gowda after putting in more than 28 years of service as an Indian forest service official trained at the Indian Forest Academy. My favourite subject during that period was the silviculture of Indian trees that includes everything involved in the growing and cultivation of trees, its ecological and economic value, its utility, etc. I had noticed that more than 90 percent of native Indian trees have regeneration problems despite much research being conducted on them. Gowda could identify a mother tree of any species anywhere in the forest.
“She can identify more than 300 medicinal plants. The Halakki tribe is known for their knowledge of medicinal plants which they mostly utilise to prevent diseases than for cure. These are knowledge and tradition passed down through generations and Tulasi is a holder of it,” he said.
Gowda has actively contributed to environmental protection by planting thousands of trees. She started as a temporary volunteer with the forest department, where she was recognised for her commitment to environmental preservation. Later, she was offered a permanent position in the department. She stepped down after it.
To researchers and fellow ecologists who know her work, Gowda is the “encyclopaedia of forest”. To the members of the Halakki Vokkalu community, she’s a “vruksha devata” (the goddess of trees). It’s through the words of those who know her work that we get a peek into her contribution as a barefoot ecologist.
(Geeta Chandrasekharan is the founder of Powerfulteachers.com, an organisation that empowers the elderly)
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