A Grassland That Doesn't Look Like One
Most people picture a grassland as something lush and open, rolling green, the kind of place that announces itself. Banni does the opposite. It sits on the northern edge of the Rann of Kutch in Gujarat, a flat, sun-baked plain that looks, to an untrained eye, like scrubland on the edge of giving up. The grass is short and dry for much of the year. The soil is saline and waterlogged after the monsoon, cracked and pale by February. And yet this 2,500-square-kilometre expanse is the largest tropical grassland in Asia. The biological richness it holds is invisible until you know what you're looking at.
