Neha Sinha: Why India's 'desert countries' biodiversity are hotspots in disguise

Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limit all rights reserved. Neha Sinha 6 min read 20 Sept 2025, 08:30 am is a Malabar Lark. (Neha Sinha) Summary At this time of year, plants are not a side shoot, but the most important event in the western ghats. In the monsoon, a live tapestry of wildflowers comes the cheese plateau in Maharashtra. The soil was a black, stuffed surface and a white manure touched it with an old fame. A little drop lies on the proceedings: suspended rather than falling on petals, lashes, bark and skin. And through the mist there were flowers – tens of thousands of flowers: blue swing against white, dark pink with light pink, purple nod against yellow, masses of electrifying pink on pink. The colors run over the dark moon -like slope in a madness, candy turns into the ground. We stood there and took up the scene and tried to fold our bodies to avoid the flowers damage. Impatiens Lawii was all around us, the flower pink with a purple throat – the color of a rich, syrupy cocktail you have with friends when the sun goes down. Then there were purple flowers, layered with a lighter center – utricularia, a bladder root species. They stood next to small white flowers reminiscent of root blossoms. Yellow, daisy-like linum mysorense nods gently. Near them were ‘Mickey Mouse’ flowers – with a rough, with red dots, such as the ears of an animated childhood, as the plant would start talking. Malabar Larks hurled in the flowers, their wings are a blur, their crest an exclamation. Frogs sat in rock pools. Crabs hid under grass. We were on the cheese plateau in Maharashtra, and everything was urgently and bright alive. The laterite Plato of Western Ghats burst into dramatic flower every year in the Na-Monite era. Many of these plateaus, formed by continuous volcanic deposition, look flat, and are also called table fields. In the summer, they look bare, even barren. Wind whips the land and the sun is ugly. The soil is thin, and it almost doesn’t look. But this is the nature of the area: the hard is its characteristic. And as is usual, it is a twin for abundance. Come Monsoon, the plateau bloated moisture, helped by the porousness of the rocks. Streams Gurgle. Rock pools high on the slope are up again. And the few inches of soil reveal wealth – indigenous wild flowers, colorful and enchanting, full of energy of small things that are not long to live. And what plants they are. Between Cheese, Mahabaleshwar and Panchgani, we saw miracles. The pretty pink impatiens – so named because their seed pods explode impatiently when they were touched – was ubiquitous. Maybe you have a different kind of impatiens in your garden. But on the plateau there were also lesser -known plants. One has a striking pink flower, with arms jumping out in the aspect of an octopus. The tentacles were covered with sticky drops, and the syrup on the drops of the promise of dense, light perfection. It was like pulling the sun in a glass jar, or seeing an heirloom Moonstone in an old closet. This is the Indian Sundew, a plant that shows teeth. Or to be more specific, a plant that eats insects – attracted by that fantastic “dew”. The many purple flowers running across the plateau were also insectivorous – bladderworts with ‘bladder’ such as portions that pinned insects. There were other plants that were parasites, but still others who were epiphytes – orchides with delicate, ephemer flowers that took turns, depending on the month. In the rock pools we saw the fog reflecting when it stopped raining. A leech or two examined the air like a heat -safe missile. Endemic plants grew on ill -considered places – the concanned Pinda with its white flowers was on the edge of the cliff in Panchgani. And the Flemingia Nilgheriensis and Delphinium Malabaricum, also endemic, had complex groups of brilliant purple flowers. They have grown with the tolerance of something that has adapted to his own corner of the world. Look at the full image of the cheese plateau with seasonal flowers. (Neha Sinha) We may not realize this, but plants map our lives. We eat it, we give them on dates, we are abused on stage through them, we walk in their shadow. But mostly our plants leave alone; Pay attention to things about things that bounce back, or things that seem to listen to it. The rock plates of the western ghats, also called the Sahyadris, have plants we don’t really need. Like the best wild flowers, in the aspect of rare Himalayan Brahmakamal, or the glory of southern India – they do best without mist, without artificial watering, without parts of pesticides. It contains generosities that reveal the true nature of the country: that it is places that support not only life, but to flourish life. That it is places that display the true turn of the season, the true spectrum of nature, at one time, fantastic, in another. Like most nature, I acknowledge that I have a special interest in carnivorous plants, in a creature that looks like one thing, but acts like another. In Satyajit Ray’s horror story The Hungry Septopus, Ray writes about a man who collects these plants. In this endeavor-a soft chase that becomes an obsession-he brings a plant home that grows in a human being, always hungry. At a certain time of day, the powerful plant produces a smell – a kind of seductive scent that others lose their minds. You should read the story for the rest. But in the real world, record me for plateaus full of plants that eat insects. Because it means that the plant has developed to fill a niche that others have not occupied, its own space is on the mountains, to say so. To see masses of utricularia is a reminder that there is a whole world in the roots, where the “bladder” is, and that water -saturated monsoon soil has many hidden puzzles. Tourists who visit these areas do this to enjoy the flowers, the climate and their own photos between the blossoms. Rarely do they see the value of the endemic flower itself, the blush of the wind that constantly lays down on the rock, the resilience of the floor with a running floor. It is also not known that not all plateaus in the world produce masses of flowers, that many of these flowers are found only in that region or even that environment; That this vegetation supports animals that occur only on that mountain or that point. It is these blind spots that have caused the authorities to incorrectly classified laterite plateaus or rock levels as desert countries; As a result, deceived steps to dump land on land, or to build on it. It must be urgent correction. These areas have survived centuries; We must make sure they survive our plans. These plants and their habitats do not need our care; But they certainly need it to leave them alone, and give them the chance to live thoughtlessly through invasive plants, concrete and mass tourism. Whether we pay attention or not, plants offer a daisy chain of interest. They show us the places that support life, and through their own bodies they support other beings. They show their deep knowledge of the country and unlock memories of natural abundance; Of what the place looked like decades ago, ten decades ago. At this time of year, plants are not the side show, but the most important event in the western ghats. May we remember their names, and remember to step gently. When we get off at the table land, I ask myself: Can we keep growing like plants? Can we open our minds to the possibility that something that looks bare can also be fertile? Can we essentially allow a small, non-verbal plant to change our worldview? Neha Sinha is a conservation biologist and author of Wild and Wally: Tales of 15 iconic Indian species. Views expressed are personal. Catch all the business news, market news, news reports and latest news updates on Live Mint. Download the Mint News app to get daily market updates. More Topics #Features Read Next Story