Goa Banyan Project: Environmental engineer Sanober Durrani's attempt to protect the trees through social capital and Instagram

A little over three years ago, civil-environmental engineer Sanober Durrani happened to learn of a distressing event occurring in her Goa neighbourhood, where she had been living since 2015. A beautiful, massive banyan which she admired ardently and that grew in her vicinity was being destroyed: “not trimmed, but literally hacked to death, [for] till date it has not to come to life,” as she puts it. During the incident, many people and friends messaged and called Durrani, sending pictures and expressing their sadness at their inability to put a stop to the destruction of the tree. “I was away from the neighbourhood at that time, and so there was nothing that I could do,” she recalls, elaborating that the incident affected her so deeply that she stopped going down that route afterwards because it was so traumatic for her to witness whatever remained of that tree, now virtually a skeleton. “It really affected a lot of us who lived in the area, and actively think about trees, making us think about social engagement and conservation,” she states.

The tragic end to that banyan tree, however, led to the inception of the Goa Banyan Project, a geo-tagging project on Instagram focused on documenting, preserving, and recording the banyans in Goa. The project is both a simultaneous appreciation of both the majesty of these trees as well as consciously thinking of them and questioning about those whose lives are being threatened.

“It started shaping up by January 2019 with the first tagged photo on Instagram,” she says, adding that the “latter platform is a no brainer because it has a large outreach and user base.” The page is now no less than a banyan tree grove, filled with over 300 posts reiterating the beauty, strength, and powerful presence of the banyans, both old and young. The page containing banyan tree submissions from across Goa, each post provides the date and location of the tree featured, and identifies it by different colours to denote their status. Black indicates a banyan’s destruction, red warning the banyan being unsafe, such as being along a road easement or under a power line, blue being unclear (for example, if the banyan is growing on “unnamed, undeveloped land”), and finally, the green as safe.

Durrani says that while all trees are vital, what with providing us with oxygen, storing carbon, giving shade, stabilising soil, and breathing life into Earth’s micro and macro ecosystems, the banyan tree are a crucial keystone species, and also happen to be a significant cultural resource. “They are an ancient legacy which are easily identifiable to most people, linking the past, present, and future while doing their job of hosting a complex microhabitat,” she mentions, describing how being under the canopy of a banyan tree “opens nonverbal communication, an understanding that we are all inherent part of nature, [that] nature is not separate from us.”

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Working across diverse grey and green infrastructure sectors with clients from all tiers of government, multilateral financial institutions, and indigenous communities, Durrani says that being an environmental advocate therefore came naturally to her. In regard to the Goa Banyan project, she refers to the important role that economist Elinor Ostrom’s theories play vis a vis the project. “I went to the London School of Economics for an MS program, and while there, witnessed Ostrom in action during one lecture,” she says, elaborating that the main gist of the lecture was that the conversation works well with greater community action.

The project places great attribution to Ostrom’s theory which utilises the idea of social capital, the latter referring to the idea of a set of shared values that allows individuals to work together in a group to effectively achieve a common purpose within the natural resources governance field.

By forming networks, norms, and values of local communities or individuals in a community, it determines cooperation in the conservation effort.  “In the context of the project, when an individual starts thinking about recording information pertaining to a banyan tree, which is what the project asks them to, then the individual subsequently starts to engage with ’nature’ through first initially spotting the banyan tree, and then afterwards recording its presence in nature,” Durrani says.

As one can observe from the posts, the accretions of details and observations specific to each tree in a way delineates it as a personality in its own right; for example, one post documenting a banyan in Parra, Goa observes how it is the “favourite roosting of a peacock” while another tree in Querim is described as being “held in love by a white temple thread.”

The effect then is if or when that recorded banyan tree faces a challenging issue or is under stress (subject to being cut or felled or pruned), that tree has an added advantage of being conserved when spotted or tagged by an individual, who has already realised and noted down its existence, location, and importance. “The individual’s acknowledging of the tree through these aspects has been possible because they spent time observing and recording it, and hence developed some kind of association with the banyan tree,” Durrani explains.

The project so far has suggested that when an individual witnessed a banyan under stress, an alarm was raised, other individuals or community members who could potentially help were informed, or there was the initiation of a direct intervention. In the latter’s case, it questioned the cutting or felling while holding space for dialogue, and so potentially changing the opinion of those planning to do so, ultimately helping the banyan tree.

During the lockdown, Durrani mentions that several banyan trees, many of them centuries old, were cut down, wondering in a post if it was deliberately done during “when ordinary persons cannot witness, voice dissent or oppose the random act of cutting down trees?” She says that like all fallen beings, some need a helping hand in getting up again, and that was what the Goa Banyan project put into motion for the trees.

She refers to an instance during the lockdown last year when her friend Pia Trivedi sent her images of a fallen Banyan tree in Arambol. “There was a massive community collaboration and dialogue in getting this fallen banyan tree back up, thereby increasing trust and social capital between individuals,” she says. Another instance that evolved into a separate movement after the Goa Banyan Project intervention was regarding a 400-year-old tree in Assagao; the movement is now calling for collective action through medium of peaceful protests for the saving of what is a dying tree located on the site of a luxury holiday home project, additional trees around it unfortunately already having been cut down.

How does Durrani then see the project as evolving? “I hope the outcome hopefully is to see more and more banyans tagged in Goa, and live to their natural end,” she says, stressing that while the project may be based in Goa, it can and should be replicated elsewhere in other cities. While individuals have reached out to her on Instagram for doing so, she also mentions that the project is easily scalable everywhere for any kind of tree. “I would also like to start one in Kashmir for Chinars (Kashmir Chinar Project),” she says, concluding with “so there is always hope.”

Priyanka Sacheti is an independent writer based in Bangalore, India. She writes about art, culture, gender, and the environment for international and Indian publications, and tweets @priyankasacheti.