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In the Chhatarpur district of Madhya Pradesh, where the Vindhya hills flatten out into the dry plains of Bundelkhand, two forests sit next to each other and could not be more different. One is a devsthal, a sacred grove watched over by the village community, its canopy still thick with mahua and sal. The other is an ordinary patch of degraded forest a short walk away, open to anyone, and stripped bare.
A 2026 study by researchers at Maharaja Chhatarsal Bundelkhand University measured what village residents already knew. At two sacred grove sites, Jatashankar and Bhimkund, they counted 70 to 72 plant species per site, including medicinal herbs such as Curcuma caesia and Chlorophytum borivilianum. The nearby degraded forest held just 40 to 51 species, many of them invasive weeds like Lantana camara. The difference was not a forest department budget or a wildlife sanctuary boundary. It was a village’s faith in a local deity.
The researchers also ran two standard ecological tests, the Shannon-Wiener diversity index and Simpson’s index of dominance, on both forest types. The gap held up.
This is a single regional study, and it deserves to be read as one data point rather than the final word. But it lines up with a much larger body of research. A review of Indian sacred groves in the Journal of Forestry Research found the same pattern across the country: these community-guarded patches consistently outperform the forest around them, even though almost none of that research has focused on central India.
That gap matters more in Bundelkhand than almost anywhere else. Forest cover across the region’s Uttar Pradesh districts stood at just 6.6 per cent of the geographic area, according to a district-level tree diversity survey published in the Indian Journal of Forestry. Only Chitrakoot, at 18.14 per cent, and Lalitpur, at 11.31 per cent, come close to a functioning forest cover. Every other district falls below that. On the Madhya Pradesh side, the numbers are worse in a different way. The India State of Forest Report 2023 recorded Madhya Pradesh losing 612.41 square kilometres of forest and tree cover between 2021 and 2023, more than any other state in the country. In a landscape this thin, a sacred grove is not a cultural curiosity. It is one of the last working forests left.
A 2025 paper from researchers affiliated with Maharaja Chhatarsal Bundelkhand University and Mahatma Gandhi Chitrakoot Gramodaya Vishwavidyalaya, titled Guardians of the Grove: The Role of Tribal and Dalit Women in Biodiversity Conservation through Sacred Forests, documents something conservation policy in India routinely misses. In many Bundelkhand communities, it is women, often Dalit and tribal women, who enforce the unwritten rules that keep these groves alive. They decide who can collect firewood and when, they watch for anyone cutting live trees, and they pass down the knowledge of which plant treats which illness. None of this work is paid. None of it appears in a forest department record.
This is not unique to Bundelkhand. Across India, researchers estimate there are somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 sacred groves, most of them undocumented. The CPR Environmental Education Centre, a Centre of Excellence set up jointly by India’s environment ministry and the CP Ramaswami Aiyar Foundation in 1989, has surveyed more than 10,000 of them over three decades and restored 53, almost all in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. North-central India, where Bundelkhand sits, has had no equivalent effort.
The first threat is ordinary land pressure. When a sacred grove sits on unclassified or revenue land rather than notified forest land, nothing stops a road, a farm or a quarry from eating into its edges. The Supreme Court itself flagged this exact risk in its December 2024 ruling on sacred groves, warning that boundaries need protection against encroachment from agriculture, settlement and clearing, precisely because so many groves across India carry no legal status at all.
The second is a slower, quieter process anthropologists call sanskritisation, the shift from nature-spirit worship to formal temple religion. When a village deity that once lived under a tree gets moved into a concrete shrine, the tree around it stops being sacred. What was once untouchable timber becomes ordinary timber. Researchers studying the central Indian plateau have tracked this shift accelerating as younger residents migrate for work and the everyday rituals that sustained the taboo fade with them.
The third is mining. Forest clearance for mining and resource extraction in the Satpura and Vindhya ranges has been documented by India’s environment ministry and cited in recent peer-reviewed research on central Indian forest loss. None of that clearance distinguishes between an ordinary forest patch and a devsthal that a village has protected for three centuries. There is no law that requires it to.
In December 2024, the Supreme Court directed Rajasthan to map and classify its sacred groves, known there as orans, as forests under the Forest Conservation Act. The bench of Justices B R Gavai, S V N Bhatti and Sandeep Mehta acted on a petition from Aman Singh of KRAPAVIS, a Rajasthan non-profit, after the state had notified only 5,000 of an estimated 25,000 orans despite a 2005 Central Empowered Committee report recommending exactly that. The court went further and asked the environment ministry to conduct a nationwide survey of sacred groves and build a governance policy around it. It also directed that communities historically protecting these groves be recognised as custodians under Section 5 of the Forest Rights Act, which would let gram sabhas regulate access and block harmful activity themselves.
Legal experts have flagged a real tension inside that ruling. The Wildlife Protection Act lets states declare sacred groves as community reserves, which would place them under Forest Department control. The Forest Rights Act does the opposite: it keeps authority with the gram sabha. Aman Singh, describing how Rajasthan’s orans lost protection once they were reclassified as revenue land decades ago, has said that only sustained policy change, not project-by-project restoration, can protect groves at scale. The same choice now sits in front of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, and neither state has moved to bring its sacred groves under either framework.
None of what Bundelkhand needs is complicated. Researchers from both universities involved in this research have called for a systematic survey of the region’s groves, formal recognition under the Forest Rights Act’s community forest resource provisions, and acknowledgement of the women who already do this work without pay or title. The CPREEC model built in the south is not a template that requires reinvention, only state government support to extend it north.
The nationwide survey the Supreme Court has recommended would, if it actually happens, put Bundelkhand’s devsthalis on a map for the first time. But a grove that gets surveyed and then sits unrecognised in the revenue records is still a grove that can be cleared for a road. Communities across Bundelkhand have carried out this conservation work for generations, with no salary, no title deed and no line item in any state forest report. The only real question left is whether the state is finally willing to formalise what it has quietly relied on all along.
Ankit Mishra is an ICSSR Fellow at Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute, Prayagraj. His research focuses on environment, climate, public policy and governance.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth