The 100,000 Sacred Groves of India – and why they may be the world’s most efficient nature reserves.

India has between 100,000 and 150,000 sacred groves. They require no government budget, no park rangers, no environmental impact assessments. They are governed by taboo, maintained by reverence, and policed by community consensus. Most of them have been operating continuously for several hundred years. Many of them are more biodiverse per hectare than the state-managed protected areas next door.

What a sacred grove actually is – and what it is not

In Kodagu district, Karnataka, a Devara Kadu sits at the edge of a coffee plantation. The coffee is monoculture, the soil around it compacted by decades of mechanised farming. Inside the grove, perhaps three acres of original semi-evergreen forest, the undergrowth is so thick you have to push through it. The canopy is unbroken. The air is noticeably cooler than the plantation forty feet away. The farmers who own the land around it will tell you clearly: this forest belongs to the deity. Nobody cuts here.

That is a sacred grove. Not a park, not a reserve, not a community forest in the legal sense. It is a patch of vegetation – ranging from a single ancient tree to several hundred hectares of continuous forest – that a community has chosen, for generations, not to touch. The reason is religious: the grove belongs to a local deity, an ancestral spirit, a river goddess. The mechanism is cultural: taboos that prohibit cutting, hunting, quarrying, and sometimes even entering without purpose. The enforcement is social: violation brings consequences that range from community disapproval to, in living memory in some villages, ritualised punishment.

The ecological result of that sustained restraint, applied across a hundred thousand locations across the country over several hundred years, is something that conservation biology did not have proper language for until quite recently. Ecologist Madhav Gadgil, who first drew systematic scientific attention to sacred groves in a 1975 paper in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, described them as “the world’s first nature reserves.” That description has held up well.

A hundred names for the same idea

The diversity of sacred grove traditions across India reflects the diversity of the communities that created them. Each name carries its own relationship to the land, its own set of taboos, its own deity or spirit.

What the science actually shows – ecosystem services without a price tag

The ecological literature on sacred groves has grown substantially since Gadgil and Vartak’s pioneering 1976 paper in Economic Botany. What it consistently shows is that sacred groves outperform their surroundings on biodiversity metrics, maintain ecosystem services that surrounding land uses have lost, and do so entirely through community governance rather than state intervention.

Biodiversity and species refugia

Sacred groves routinely support plant and animal species that have disappeared from surrounding landscapes. A 2019 study published in Biotropica, examining 41 sacred groves across Madhya Pradesh, found that the groves harboured 109 tree species across 90 genera and 40 families – a diversity considerably higher than comparable unprotected forest plots in the same region. The same study found that the groves had higher carbon stock and sequestration potential in both vegetation and soil than adjacent degraded forest.

In the Western Ghats, a biodiversity hotspot with over 2,000 endemic plant species and 300 endemic vertebrate species, sacred groves are described by researchers as ecological refugia: islands of intact vegetation from which species can recolonise surrounding habitats when conditions improve. Karnataka’s Devara Kadus support rare orchid species, the Malabar pit viper, and tree frog species whose populations have been reduced to scattered remnants in the broader landscape.

In Manipur, a 2005 study by Khumbongmayum et al. in Biodiversity and Conservation documented 241 species from 68 families in four Umang Lai groves – a higher per-hectare species count than several state-managed wildlife sanctuaries in the same region. The governance mechanism was entirely customary.

Water recharge and catchment protection

The connection between sacred groves and reliable water sources is not accidental. Root systems in old-growth forest groves act as natural sponges – absorbing rainfall that would otherwise run off compacted agricultural or degraded land, and slowly releasing it into groundwater systems that feed wells and streams through the dry season. Communities have known this for as long as they have maintained the groves; the scientific literature has confirmed it through hydrological measurement only recently.

A consistent finding across multiple studies is that communities living near intact sacred groves report more reliable dry-season water availability than comparable communities whose groves have been degraded or cleared. In Maharashtra’s Konkan region, researchers found that Devrais and their surrounding agroforestry plots together maintained groundwater recharge even during years of below-average rainfall, while land cleared of its sacred grove traditions showed accelerated surface runoff and well depletion.

Carbon sequestration

Sacred groves store carbon in two ways: in above-ground biomass (the trees themselves), and in soil organic carbon accumulated over centuries of undisturbed litter decomposition. The Biotropica study of Madhya Pradesh sacred groves found significantly higher carbon stocks in both vegetation and soil compared to degraded forest plots, even controlling for tree density. A 2024 study in Frontiers in Ecology found that mature sacred groves in semi-arid southern India act as modest but consistent carbon sinks, with distinct soil nutrient profiles and erosion rates that differ measurably from surrounding land uses.

The total carbon sequestration potential of India’s estimated 33,000 hectares of sacred groves is not enormous in aggregate terms – it does not compete with large-scale afforestation programmes. But the quality of the carbon stored is high: it is in stable, long-lived tree biomass and deep soil organic matter, not in recently planted monoculture plantations with uncertain survival rates.

What is threatening them – and the threats that rarely get named

The ecological literature is consistent: where sacred groves are intact and their governance traditions are alive, they function. Where those traditions have weakened or broken, the groves degrade rapidly. The threats are multiple and, in several cases, accelerating.

1. Economic development pressure and land conversion. As land values rise around urban and peri-urban areas, the financial opportunity cost of maintaining unproductive forest land increases. Sacred groves on private land face conversion pressure when land can be sold for construction or agriculture. In Maharashtra’s Vidarbha and Konkan regions, Devrais have been cleared for mango orchards, construction, and quarrying in areas where the religious tradition has weakened. “Economic aspirations have eroded sacred groves in many areas,” noted Dr. Chandrakant Malhotra of CSIR-IHBT in a 2021 Christian Science Monitor investigation.
2. Religious homogenisation. The specific local deities and beliefs that sustain sacred grove traditions are sometimes displaced by mainstream Hindu, Christian, or other religious practice – particularly in communities that have experienced rapid religious conversion or where younger generations have moved to cities. When the specific deity associated with a grove is no longer worshipped, the cultural prohibition on cutting is no longer enforced. The grove then becomes ordinary forest, subject to the full range of extraction pressures facing ordinary forest.
3. Intergenerational knowledge loss. The rules governing sacred grove management – what can be taken and when, what ritual procedures govern any intervention, which species are absolutely protected – are typically transmitted orally through elders. As younger community members migrate to cities, that knowledge transmission breaks. In ClimateVarsity’s fieldwork across multiple states between 2021 and 2026, the most common finding was not hostility to sacred grove traditions but unfamiliarity with them among the 30-45 age cohort. The knowledge exists, but is held by increasingly elderly keepers.
4. Introduced and invasive species. Lantana camara and Prosopis juliflora – both introduced species now classed as invasive – are encroaching on sacred groves across peninsular and semi-arid India. These species establish in grove margins, reduce light penetration, suppress native regeneration, and alter the microhabitat that makes sacred groves ecologically distinctive. Unlike cutting, which communities recognise as a violation, invasive species establishment is often not addressed by traditional grove governance frameworks because it has no historical precedent in those traditions.
5. The Supreme Court’s December 2024 Oran order – and its contested implications. The Supreme Court’s December 18, 2024 judgment directing Rajasthan to map Orans and classify them as forests under the Wildlife Protection Act has been welcomed by some conservation groups and disputed by others. The concern, raised by Adivasi rights organisations and legal scholars, is that state classification as forest removes the groves from community governance and brings them under Forest Department control – the same institutional framework that has often been hostile to traditional forest users. The Forest Rights Act 2006 recognises community rights over forest land; the WLPA classification potentially contradicts that. The tension between state protection and community governance is unresolved, and how it resolves will matter enormously for the long-term future of India’s sacred grove traditions.

Sacred groves occupy only about 33,000 hectares – 0.01 per cent of India’s total area. Yet they preserve biodiversity, maintain water cycles, protect medicinal plants, and store carbon in old-growth biomass that no plantation programme can replicate. The ecological significance of these patches is disproportionate to their size by an order of magnitude. – Down to Earth / Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, December 2024

What the governance model actually teaches conservation science

Conservation biology has spent decades developing frameworks for what makes protected areas work: sufficient size, buffer zones, corridors, ranger coverage, legal enforcement, funding. Sacred groves violate most of those frameworks and work anyway. The question of why is one that researchers have been working on seriously only since the 1990s.

The answer is not simple, but it centres on a principle that is easier to state than to replicate: when a community owns the resource and understands its own dependence on it, the governance mechanisms it creates tend to be more locally calibrated and more durably enforced than any external management system. The community knows which trees are oldest, which springs are fed by which root systems, which species have disappeared from the surrounding landscape and still survive inside the grove. That knowledge is the basis for effective management. No state forest agency, operating from a district headquarters, has access to it at the resolution at which it matters.

This is what conservation scholars call community-based conservation – and sacred groves are among its oldest and most successful examples globally. The Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom’s work on governing the commons, which won the 2009 economics prize, provides the theoretical framework: communities can and do manage shared resources sustainably, provided certain institutional conditions hold. Sacred groves are empirical validation of that theory, operating at scale, across the full diversity of India’s ecological and cultural landscape.

What this has to do with climate literacy – and with ClimateVarsity’s work

Sacred groves do not appear in India’s Nationally Determined Contributions to the Paris Agreement. They are not counted in the government’s forest cover statistics in any systematic way. They do not generate carbon credits or receive payments for ecosystem services. They are not part of any national biodiversity strategy’s formal accounting. They exist, and they function, entirely outside the frameworks through which the state measures and manages natural systems.

This invisibility has consequences. When sacred grove traditions weaken and groves degrade, the loss does not register in any official dataset. When a Devrai is cleared for a mango orchard in Ratnagiri, it does not trigger a deforestation alert. When a Sarna in Jharkhand loses its community protection because the elders who maintained it have passed without successors, no government agency notices.

At ClimateVarsity, sacred groves appear in our content not as historical curiosities but as working climate solutions. In communities where we run programmes, we ask people what sacred sites or protected groves exist in their landscape, and we use those as entry points for conversations about biodiversity, water, and carbon. When a farmer in Kodagu describes the Devara Kadu at the edge of his coffee plantation, we help him connect that observation to the hydrology of his water source, the biodiversity that his coffee’s pollinators depend on, and the specific ways in which climate change is threatening both.

The knowledge is there. The practice is there. What is often missing is the frame that connects them to contemporary climate action – and the recognition that India’s communities have been running effective climate solutions for centuries without calling them that.

The grove at the edge of the plantation

During fieldwork in Kodagu in 2022, a farmer named Muthappa walked our team through his coffee estate and then stopped at the edge of the Devara Kadu. He did not go in – the grove’s rules require ritual permission for entry, which he had not sought that day. He stood at the boundary and pointed to the canopy.

A pair of Malabar whistling thrush were calling from inside. The soil at his feet, on the plantation side of the boundary, was pale and compacted. The soil inside the grove, visible through the undergrowth, was dark and friable. The temperature difference was perceptible within a metre of the boundary.

He told us that his father’s generation knew every species inside that grove by name. He knew perhaps half of them. His daughter, who was studying engineering in Mysore, knew none. He said this without apparent distress – as a fact, the way one states that the rainy season starts later than it used to. But he said it.

The gap between what Muthappa’s father knew and what his daughter knows is not just a biodiversity knowledge gap. It is a climate resilience gap. The Devara Kadu will continue to function as long as the community continues to protect it. The community will continue to protect it as long as someone understands why it matters. That understanding is exactly what climate literacy is for.