The Palni Hills Conservation Council was formed in 1985 as an organization devoted to promoting sustainable development and environmental protection and restoration. The core group continues to consist of ecologists, environmentalists, botanists, wildlife enthusiasts and lovers of the natural environment. Around twenty-five staff support day to day activities ranging from beekeepers to water chemists to field workers in tree planting, habitat restoration and community uplift.
The Palni Hills is the eastern spur of the biodiversity rich Western Ghat range in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu. The landscape of the hills varies from dry deciduous to wet temperate zones. The hills start at 280m above sea level and rise up to 2300m. Native grasslands formerly covered 60% the landscape with pockets of high elevation native hardwood trees called Sholai. Due to intense plantation of foreign timber trees the high grasslands habitat has become endangered.
The Palni Hills Conservation Council has worked in many of the villages in these hills over the past thirty six (36) years on forestry and apiculture projects, in concert with the communities and the issues pertaining to the hill communities. The maintenance of three, grassland and marshland 200 or more nurseries at different altitudes, comprising about 100 native species, have been the mainstay of the PHCC projects for decades; planting and restoration of many patches of degraded forests and wetlands have resulted from these efforts.
PHCC has been an activist group, taking up campaigns against unsustainable tourism, monitoring water pollution and mercury waste from entering the ecosystem. Most of the work was at the forest edge to grow native trees on farmlands; local communities allowed degraded forests to recover and could satisfy their needs through around 20 million tree-seedlings raised so far. The long term vision is for a green belt in the foothill surrounding the Palani range. This is to alter the microclimate helping to locally mitigate climate change and to extend the wildlife habitat from the hills.
Over three decades in concert with environmentalists and other NGOs, PHCC has succeeded through lobbying efforts in convincing sections of the government that alternatives to mainstream exploitation of natural resources are sustainable and practicable by community involvement. The State owns more than half the land in the Palni Hills and the beneficiaries / stakeholders have access to the rest. The Government was enacting massive plantation programs on native grasslands as was the fashion globally. Due to PHCC efforts in public awareness dissemination and lobbying further planting of invasive foreign species has been terminated; efforts are now afoot to reverse the ecological damage to the watershed by this decades long abuse of Palani Hills natural resources.
PHCC works to raise a new consciousness of the people and prevent such future mistakes in the Middle Hills. The PHCC promotes community participation in forest governance and to provide a platform to voice community concerns around the ecosystem in the neighborhood.