Wild Capital: Discovering Nature in Delhi - Delhi’s diverse ecology hides in plain sight

A firefly at dusk. Grass flowers underfoot. A bird calling outside a window. These are the small things Neha Sinha uses to make her point: Delhi is not just concrete and traffic, whatever it looks like from inside a car. Wild Capital: Discovering Nature in Delhi tries to prove it, one overlooked corner of the city at a time.

Sinha trained in conservation at Oxford, and studied literature at St Stephen’s College. Both show up in the writing, sometimes in the same paragraph. There is real science here, on trees, birds, mammals, and the older ecological history sitting under the city’s newer one. But it rarely reads like a textbook. Most of it reads like a diary. Nights spent tracking mammal trails. Days spent relearning words the city had let her forget.

What holds the book together is not one park or forest. It’s the people. Sunil Harsana has spent years guarding the Mangar Bani grove, possibly the last scrap of primary forest the region has left. Sohail Madan helped revive the Asola Bhatti sanctuary. Pradip Krishen appears too, more as an influence than a companion, his own writing on Delhi’s trees a clear touchstone for Sinha. None of them get long introductions. They just appear, the way people do when you keep returning to the same wild corners of a city. Add a few researchers and birdwatchers she meets along the way and the book stops feeling like one woman’s private discovery. It becomes a shared project, running through the Aravallis, Sanjay Van and the Yamuna, wherever the next lead takes her. The point underneath all this: Delhi’s nature survives less because of policy, and more because a small group of people refuse to stop paying attention to it.

Sinha does not look away from the damage either. Stone mining has torn into the Aravallis for decades, obliterating the native plants and the animals that depended on them. The Yamuna comes off worse. Sinha barely needs to argue the point; the river’s current state speaks for itself. Officially, the National Capital Region has more than 18,000 parks and gardens. That number sounds reassuring, until you notice what it leaves out: the smaller, unofficial green patches giving way every year to construction, gone before anyone logs them. Sinha doesn’t dwell on this in anger. She simply keeps naming what’s still there, as if naming it were a kind of insurance. Delhi, in this book, is contested ground, being written down even as it shrinks.

The book moves easily between two registers, observation and memoir, and Sinha handles the join well. A paragraph on a species or a habitat will slide into a memory of a friendship or a moment of comfort found on one of these outings, and the shift never feels forced. If anything, the personal material deepens the ecological writing rather than competing with it.

Field guides on Delhi's biodiversity aren’t rare. Neither are dry environmental reports, or the odd op-ed about a felled tree. Harder to find is a book that sits with these habitats long enough to say what it actually feels like to live alongside them, week after week, without losing patience with the city. That’s the gap Sinha fills, with more warmth than this kind of writing usually manages. What stays with you is something else: a city being noticed, right before it disappears. It is the kind of noticing that, once you’ve read the book, is hard to unlearn.