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Hyderabad: A lifelong effort to create a forest, several government accolades and half a century of environmental activism that inspired generations. None of it was enough to protect Dusharla Satyanarayana from the men who nearly killed him.

The 72-year-old president of Jala Sadhana Samithi was attacked on his ancestral land in Raghavapuram village of Mothe mandal, Suryapet district, on April 23. 

He had received the Telangana Governor’s Pratibha Puraskar in 2024 for his extraordinary contribution to environmental conservation. Less than two years later, he lies in the care of a team of doctors at the Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences (NIMS) in Hyderabad. His fault was that he tried to protect the forest he had been growing since he was six years old.

What happened on April 23

Dusharla had just entered the 70-acre forest on his ancestral land along with a member of his organisation when he spotted a flock of goats grazing on the tender shoots of trees he had planted over decades. When he confronted the shepherds, two families warned him that only one of them would walk out alive that day. 

They called their children and relatives from the village. A group of nine, including women and adolescents, descended on the elderly activist and allegedly beat him with sticks and rods without mercy.

The blows cracked open his skull. The attackers did not stop. They continued to strike him across his body until he lay bloodied on the forest floor he had spent his life nurturing.

His companion, who had been warned he would also be killed, managed to escape, reached the main road and called the Suryapet Superintendent of Police. The police arrived in 20 minutes. The assault was over in 10.

Dusharla, his clothes soaked in blood, was rushed to a local hospital. When Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy learnt of the attack, he ordered officials to shift him to NIMS and directed that all treatment costs be borne by the state government. Four persons have been arrested and remanded on charges of attempt to murder. The rest remain absconding, with non-bailable warrants issued against them.

A decade of threats ignored

Dusharla told Siasat.com that the attackers were not native to the village. They had migrated about 20 years ago. Though they owned no land bordering his forest, they had leased a small plot nearby to graze their 80-odd goats, and had been encroaching on his forest ever since.

“Several attempts were made by them to kill me over the last decade or so. They dug pits in my forest and covered them with leaves so that when I travelled through that path, I would fall. They tried several times to encroach on the forest. I had built a shelter between boulders where I used to sleep. One night they destroyed it with knives. I had complained to the District Collector and Superintendent of Police (SP) back then, but no action was taken,” he said.

The attackers would regularly cut fresh shoots to feed their goats and let the animals roam freely inside the forest whenever Dusharla was away.

There is more to this attack than a dispute over grazing. Dusharla had, over the years, received offers from individuals and timber contractors willing to pay crores for the right to exploit his forest. He turned every one of them down. 

The men who beat him on April 23 may have been pawns, but the forces protecting them from behind remain invisible, and that is the part that worries those who know him best.

Because he dedicated his entire ancestral property to nature, Dusharla paid a personal price too – a broken marriage. His only son completed his master’s degree in the United States and now works there. He raised the boy to be as passionate about conservation as himself.

Who is Dusharla Satyanarayana

Dusharla has been politically active since his college days at City College, Hyderabad. His earliest and most consequential campaign was against fluorosis in the erstwhile Nalgonda district, at a time when most of the country had barely heard of the disease.

To force the issue into national consciousness, he convinced 480 people to file nominations for the 1996 Lok Sabha elections, a stunt that drew significant national attention. That tradition of mass nominations to spotlight local crises continues in Telangana to this day. He also personally took a fluorosis-affected child to meet then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, which eventually led to a dedicated drinking water scheme for fluoride-hit areas in Nalgonda.

In the 1980s, he founded Jala Sadhana Samithi to bring irrigation to the water-starved lands of the erstwhile Nalgonda and Mahabubnagar districts. The pressure the organisation built on successive governments brought lakhs of acres under irrigation. Today, newly recruited Forest Beat Officers are sent to his forest as a field trip to understand what conservation actually looks like on the ground.

He has been arrested many times. He has faced criminals and gangsters throughout his life. And he survived all of it, only to be felled by sticks and rods on the very land he consecrated to nature, the land he calls his holy ground.

What happens to the forest now

The question that haunts those who know Dusharla is a simple one. What happens after him?

Forests Minister Konda Surekha visited him at NIMS and assured him that forest officials would be stationed on his land to protect it. But how a 70-acre unfenced forest is to be guarded against land sharks playing a long game remains unclear.

Dusharla himself remains unhurt in spirit. He believes his faith in nature and in God saved his life on the day it came closest to being taken. The forest is still standing. For now, so is he.