Blog

Residents of Dehradun are not new to this. They have seen this transformation unfold with their own eyes. The Sahastradhara Road was once one of the city’s defining landscapes, a beautiful green corridor lined with towering trees whose canopies met overhead to create a natural tunnel. Driving along that road was never just about reaching a destination, it was about experiencing a city that still breathed. Then came the road-widening project, and residents were assured that many of these old trees would be carefully uprooted and replanted elsewhere. On paper, the promise sounded reassuring but in reality, most people who live there know what happened. The trees survived only in the technical sense of the word. Their roots never truly took hold again, their branches gradually dried up and today many stand like hollow skeletons… silent reminders that nature cannot simply be shifted from one place to another as though it were street furniture. You can transplant a tree, but you cannot transplant the decades of relationships it has built with the soil, the birds, the insects, the microorganisms and the landscape around it.