For the people of Dewas in Madhya Pradesh, Shankargarh Hill has never been just a ridge of sandstone. It has been a landmark of memory, mythology and ecology. It shapes the town’s groundwater, shields it from dust storms, and gives generations a sense of place. Older residents could recall that until the 1950s, the hill stood untouched— dense with wild shrubs, medicinal herbs, and seasonal waterfalls visible from the road. It also carried spiritual weight. Locals describe a temple established around 1950 by the royal family of Dewas after “Shankar ji appeared in a dream”, asking the king not to dig the sacred hill. The remains of an old summer house and a centuries-old well on the crest still testify to that earlier life.
By the 1970s and 80s, the hill remained a scenic refuge. Then came the 1990s, bringing industrialisation to Dewas. By 2015, as many as 33 mines were operating on the hill — some legal, many not — severely damaging the ecological spine of the district.
The hill that once symbolised Dewas’s natural heritage almost stood on the brink of collapse. Yet what followed was a determined response marked by legal, administrative, and grassroots mobilisation.
This recovery began when a community—supported by a tribunal order, a proactive forest department, and a new wave of young volunteers—pulled the hill back from the edge.
India’s loss of hill ecosystems and “deemed forests” to small, unregulated mining operations is a widespread but often overlooked crisis. Scattered patches escape national scrutiny, yet the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) estimates lakhs of hectares nationwide are degraded by mining, largely in central states such as Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Odisha. Meeting India’s Bonn Challenge pledge—restoring 26 million hectares by 2030—and its Land Degradation Neutrality target depends on local recoveries like Shankargarh. Such sites form the foundation of national-scale restoration.
What sets Shankargarh apart is not the scale of damage, which was modest by national standards, but the sequence of interventions that followed.
The first formal challenge came in 2013, when Smt. Radharani Vajpayee filed an application before the National Green Tribunal (OA 140/2013 CZ). Her petition warned that the “hills of Shankargarh have almost vanished due to illegal mining” and that 18 to 33 mines, spread across Khasra Nos. 449, 450/2 and 404, were operating without environmental impact assessments — a mandatory requirement under Indian law.
The Tribunal took the matter seriously. In its early orders of January and March 2014, it observed that many miners were functioning on land recorded as “forest” in revenue registers and directed the impleadment of 17 additional operators. Then, on 23 September 2014, came an observation that would set the tone for everything that followed:
“The environment as a whole is being targeted and needs not only protection but improvement… The Collector shall consider handing over the area to the Forest Department for preservation and natural regeneration.”
For the first time, an authority had named Shankargarh as an ecologically fragile system deserving long-term protection — not a revenue parcel, not a mineral block.
By March 2015, the NGT recorded that all 33 mining leases had been cancelled or closed, and that stone-crushing units had been sealed, with action confirmed by the district administration and the mining department. The Tribunal, then, made a crucial move: from stopping the harm to repairing it. In May 2015, it ordered each miner to deposit 50 per cent of the restoration cost and a security of Rs 1 lakh per hectare. Followed by directing the district collector and the chief conservator of forests, Ujjain, to implement the restoration plan. In December 2016, after reprimanding leaseholders, who were trying to evade responsibility, the Tribunal disposed of the case, directing restoration before the monsoon and monitoring by the forest and district authorities.
The “polluter pays” principle, often quoted but rarely enforced at the small scale, found concrete expression here.
Yet legal closure did not immediately end ongoing mining. It continued at Shankargarh until 2019, often during enforcement gaps. During this period (2016-2019), Dewas youth confronted miners, built evidence, and prepared for the next phase.
By 2016, even as illegal extraction continued in the shadows, a small group of young residents — many of whom had grown up picnicking on the hill — began climbing Shankargarh with seed packets and jerry cans of water, believing that regeneration was possible. They wrote to the then collector, who supported their idea informally. Year after year, with their own money, they broadcast seeds, carried water on their backs, and planted 100 to 200 saplings at a time.
The survival rate was dismal in the beginning — barely 10-12 per cent. The soil was refractory, with near-zero moisture retention. Many saplings died within a season. Yet the volunteers persisted, and in doing so, established something more durable than any single plantation: a social baseline for Shankargarh’s eventual transformation.
This brought a paradigm shift almost by accident. A chance interaction between the youth group and a forest officer opened an institutional door. The officer recognised the volunteers’ efforts and offered the department’s support. Senior officers, aware of their legal obligations under the NGT order, began treating Shankargarh as a deemed-forest-restoration mandate rather than a peripheral file.
In 2019, the forest department formally re-initiated plantations across the degraded area, building on the prior volunteer work. This marked the point at which local goodwill met government capacity, launching the official restoration phase.
In 2021, the volunteers formally organised themselves as the Green Army. Their remit was concrete: patrolling the hill, responding to fire outbreaks, reporting encroachments, supporting plantation, soil and moisture work, and mobilising schools, colleges and social groups. The group soon became the emotional centre of the project.
What unfolded between 2021 and 2024 is rare in Indian conservation: a city of stakeholders aligning around a single hill. The forest department led technical planning, species selection, and soil moisture work. The district administration coordinated enforcement and instituted the annual Hill Festival. The judiciary contributed a Nyaya Vatika and the police a Suraksha Vatika — symbolic plantations that became patrol anchors. The local Doctors’ Association organised plantation drives. Schools and colleges supplied thousands of students. The Bank Note Press, Dewas, participated through CSR. The PWD and Agriculture Department contributed to bunds and contour trenches. Business communities sponsored water tankers. Spiritual groups brought mass mobilisation. Soon, Shankargarh became one of India’s 75 Nagar Vans under the national programme.
In national terms, this does matter a lot. The Nagar Van Yojana, launched by the MoEFCC in 2020, aims to develop 1,000 urban forests over a decade. Most are still on paper or in early stages of development. Shankargarh is among the few that can show a measurable ecological gradient.
The most underappreciated decision of the restoration was the operational sequencing. Plantation did not begin first; soil and moisture conservation did. The forest department constructed over 2,000 contour trenches, deep CCTs (continuous contour trenches) on the upper slopes, check-dams, mulching and soil amendments, grazing protection, and fire lines.
Stabilising the slopes before planting was crucial: this order directly led to survival rates rising from 10 per cent in the 2016 volunteer phase to 65-70 per cent and above from 2022 onward. These systematic interventions applied basic restoration ecology principles, not a novel intervention.
The recovery is visible from space. The Normalised Difference Vegetation Index, or NDVI, is a satellite-derived measure of the amount of living, photosynthesising vegetation on the ground. The values range from below 0 (barren rock and exposed soil) to above 0.4 (dense, healthy vegetation), with the middle range representing sparse and moderate cover.
In 2017, the Shankargarh footprint was dominated by the orange and red bands — sparse and barren classes — exactly what one would expect of a recently abandoned mining landscape. By 2025, after eight years of soil works, plantation and protection, those orange patches have shrunk substantially. Yellow (moderate) and green (dense) cover dominate large parts of the hill, particularly in the eastern and central blocks. The transition is not uniform — some slopes still show sparse cover, a reminder that recovery is uneven and ongoing — but the directional change is unambiguous. A landscape that was photosynthetically dead in places is now photosynthetically active across most of its area. In the simplest terms, where the satellite earlier saw rock, it now sees leaves.
By 2022-2024, camera traps and local observations had begun recording wildlife such as leopards, striped hyenas, jungle cats, porcupines, grey francolins, and vultures roosting on the peak. Today, the hill carries 83 hectares of regenerating forest, a Biodiversity Park with 30,800 plants of 51 species, eight revived natural springs, and a network of trails and fenced zones. Dedicated Vatika patches anchor different institutions to specific plots. Shankargarh now functions as Dewas’s green lungs.
In October 2025, the NGT delivered a second verdict on Shankargarh — disposing of OA 37/2025 (CZ), Samarjeet Jadhav vs. State of MP, and directing that the 50.292 hectares of restored Shankargarh Nagar Van land retain its forest status, blocking a proposed tourism project on the site. The order specifically describes Shankargarh as “restored after extensive mining activities” and directs the forest department to enhance forestry activities under CAMPA. A decade after the first NGT order shut down the mines, a second order has now insulated the recovery from commercialisation. The legal arc that began with stopping extraction has come full circle — first removing the harm, then funding the repair, and now protecting the regenerated landscape against the next wave of pressure.
Why Shankargarh matters beyond Dewas
India’s restoration challenge will not be met by mega-projects alone. It will be met, hectare by hectare, in places like Shankargarh — where a tribunal order, a forest division and a few hundred volunteers managed to do what national targets often struggle to: convert a degraded site into a self-sustaining ecosystem within a decade.
There are three lessons that go beyond Madhya Pradesh. Firstly, legal action is necessary but not sufficient. The NGT shut down the mines, but the hill returned only when restoration gained a social constituency. Secondly, sequencing matters more than ambition. Soil and water before saplings are unglamorous, but they are the striking difference between a 10 per cent and a 70 per cent survival rate. Thirdly, forest departments are most effective when they share authorship. Ultimately, Shankargarh’s institutional success came from the department becoming a partner to citizens, not a gatekeeper over them.
A hill that was almost lost has now become a place where children climb and spot wildlife, and satellite images show greenery where it once read rock. For a country negotiating the difficult arithmetic of restoration, that is no small thing.
Pradeep Mishra is an Indian Forest Service (IFS) officer posted in Madhya Pradesh. He writes on forest governance, community forestry, and environmental policy. The views expressed are entirely personal and do not represent official departmental positions.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth