Once upon a time it was – and perhaps still is – commonplace to regard termites as ‘pests’ to be destroyed. It’s true, of course, that termites cause serious damage by chewing into wood, books, even electrical wires. Termites are built to go after anything made from cellulose: dead plants, leaf litter, dried grass stems, bark – they are all food for them. Foresters in India blame them for killing trees and young saplings and have routinely used deadly chemicals to destroy them when they are planting up a site.Can you blame termites for not being able to tell the difference between a dead tree in the forest and the (dead) wooden planks of your bookshelf or chaukhat?Termites rebuild a broken mound on the Central Ridge, Delhi, May 2026. Photo: Pradip Krishen.Our understanding of the role that termites play in natural environments has now been turned inside out. Termites are not interested in living tissue, so blaming them for killing saplings is not justified. Far from regarding them as pests to be destroyed, termites are now recognised to be a key part of functioning ecosystems.Their presence increases the robustness of dryland ecosystems, influencing the distribution and retention of moisture and nutrients which, in turn, affects microbial, plant and animal diversity and resilience.We ought to be protecting and supporting termites and their activities, instead of trying to exterminate them. You can’t avoid spotting termite mounds when you walk on the Ridge in Delhi. They’re usually quite small, with two or three ‘turrets’, typically about half a metre high. Their building materials are simple: tiny pellets of soil mixed with their own dung and compacted by saliva.A Near-Miss for the RidgeIn April, Delhi’s Forest Department issued a tender for carrying out ‘anti-termite treatment’ on the Ridge for a plantation project. The tender specified using an organophosphate called Chlorpyrifos and a banned chemical called Lindane, which together would have destroyed not just termites but all the microbes and insects that live in the soil. The collateral damage to other forms of life would have been catastrophic.This was a tragedy in the making. Anti-termite treatment will make ‘dead’ soil. You can then kiss goodbye to any thoughts of restoring the natural ecology of this tract.To the credit of the Forest Department, it responded to a public outcry by rescinding its tender and cancelling the order to use toxic chemicals. But we came very, very close to a situation where the greatest natural asset the Ridge possesses – its living soil – would have been destroyed.Still, it raises worrying thoughts: Has the Forest Department been using these chemicals on the Ridge routinely in the past? Civil society found out this one time and raised an alarm. What about all the planting that has been done on the Ridge, especially since 2021? If using these toxic chemicals is ‘standard operating procedure’, are parts of the Ridge already poisoned?Scientists have spent a long time trying to figure out exactly how termites are able to break down hard woody tissue (lignin), because they can’t do that on their own. They discovered an intimate partnership between termites and fungi, which are the only major organisms capable of breaking down lignin.How do fungi enter the picture?Deep inside a termite mound – but only in the Old World tropics – one subfamily of termites cultivates ‘fungus gardens’ inside their nests. Not just any fungus – a particular genus called Termitomyces, with over 50 species that are all completely dependent on termites for their own survival. It’s an amazing, stable partnership that’s been going on for some 30 million years.A Termitomyces mushroom, showing a stem long enough to burst through the top of a termite mound, Central Ridge, Delhi, May 2026. Photo: Pradip KrishenTermites cannot fully digest the woody polymers of lignin on their own. Young termites – only the young ones – mix fungal spores with lignin in their stomachs and deposit faecal pellets rich with this mixture when they return to their nest. This is what fungal ‘gardens’ or ‘combs’ are made of – carton-conservatories where fungi live, deep inside termite nests.Termitomyces mushrooms emerging through the top of a termite mound, central Ridge, Delhi, May 2026. Photo: Pradip Krishen.After about six weeks of growing on the combs, the fungi are able to break down lignin into a compost mash that becomes food for the entire termite colony. Fungal spores in the compost then pass undamaged through the stomachs of termites and germinate in fresh faecal pellets.Full circle!Termites play a hugely important role in natural ecosystems. Their mounds maintain the fertility of the soil. In relatively poor soil, they are like nutrient-rich islands that naturally fertilise their surroundings. The soil is made porous by the tunnels within and is high in nutrients because of the fungi and plant seeds deposited there by termites.It’s high time to put those toxic chemicals away. Forever.Fungal conservatory inside a termite nest, Central Ridge, Delhi, May 2026. Photo: Pradip KrishenBut now there’s another threat to termites on the Ridge – big yellow prehistoric-looking monsters called JCBs. And they’re going back and forth in the forest, scraping away bushes and climbers, churning up the soil and prepping to do some deep digging.The Forest Department is on a mission to ‘restore’ the Ridge and one of its primary tasks is to root out vilaiti keekar – Neltuma juliflora (the new name for Prosopis juliflora). This is an invasive exotic tree from Mexico and South America that was first introduced on the Ridge around 1920. In a little more than a century since then, from just a few trees planted on the Ridge by the Superintendent of Horticultural Operations in Delhi – William Mustoe – they have burgeoned and outcompeted everything else to become a scourge.Something like 90% of the trees on the Ridge are now vilaiti keekar: far too successful for anyone else’s good. It’s about time that the Forest Department started doing something about them. (Why did it wait so long?)Smashed termite mound on the Central Ridge, Delhi, May 2026. Photo: Pradip KrishenIt’s sad to note, though, that JCBs are completely inappropriate for the job. By breaking the surface of the soil, they kill biocrust – the living skin of semi-arid soils that plays such an important role. Biocrusts contribute carbon to the soil, hold in moisture, fix atmospheric nitrogen and are an important source for food for organisms that live in the soil. Over 90% of the energy flows in the soil are mediated by microbes in biocrust along with fungi, making them the most important ‘chemical engineers’ of arid land soils.So the Forest Department is destroying the greatest asset that the degraded Ridge possesses – its living soil, teeming with life.Termites in their above-ground castles are getting smashed too. Almost everywhere you look you can see termite castles broken. The JCB driver doesn’t care. He’s not been told to look out for them.The real problem is that the government’s plans don’t mention biocrust or fungi – they haven’t appeared in a forester’s lens yet. For the Forest Department, and the Forest Research Institute that makes its management plans, biocrusts, fungi and termites don’t even deserve a mention. They don’t seem to matter.An old termite mound, no longer in use, on the Central Ridge, Delhi, May 2026. Photo: Pradip KrishenThe trouble is, THEY DO!Termites play a huge role in the natural world as recyclers of dead plant matter, making them bioavailable as new minerals and nutrients. Imagine what it would be like for the forest floor to be filled to the brim with dead trees and plant matter? One estimate puts the volume of ligno-cellulose materials that termites decompose each year at 3 to 7 billion tonnes!Please call off the JCBs. They’re destroying priceless assets.Pradip Krishen is the author-photographer of Trees of Delhi: A Field Guide (2006) and Jungle Trees of Central India: A Field Guide for Tree Spotters (2015).