On one occasion, while living in a village in the Tulsi Dongri, a thorn got my foot. It was a kuvva thorn, known for the painful effect that follows quite soon after the tip breaks off inside the skin. Even the rind of its fruit is toxic to fish; they are dried and powdered and sprinkled in shallow pools to stupefy fish in the summer months.

VIKASA began its work in Vontimamidipalen, a small tribal village in Madugula Mandal. The work was wasteland development and plantations were raised in an agro-forestry model on 15 acres of land as a pilot programme. The successful work spread to twenty other villages in two panchayats – Avuruwada and Jalampalli – with support from Oxfam-India.

Some months ago I went on a long journey through parts of tribal India. Getting off the bus in Malkangiri district, supposedly the most backward region in Odisha, I headed for a village which I frequented in the past. I noticed that the single-file trail had been widened and made jeepable and, perhaps as a consequence, many of the old silk-cotton and mango trees had vanished. The lack of shade told on me. In the village I knew most people well and very soon the mel - liquor distilled from mahua flowers – made its appearance on my arrival. I wandered about the village, exchanging news and taking in what I saw.

Saneesh C S & Anita Varghese The local name for C.circinalis is eentha. It is fairly abundant in the area and represented in all stages. Cycad populations have been observed in semievergreen and moist deciduous forests at elevations ranging from 30-100 m Many plants were also found growing within the teak plantations and bamboo thickets of the area.

Madhu Ramnath For reasons that are as yet quite unclear, some plants of the same specie flower simultaneously and gregariously once in several years, a characteristic known as masting. Unlike plants that flower and fruit annually or biennially, masting is a pattern of reproduction in which an entire population of a species reproduce together. This entails a synchronicity in flowering and fruiting of a species – sometimes even in different continents – setting off a chain of events that may cause changes in the various animal populations in a forest.