The big fire came out on the night of Wednesday, March 25, 2026, to burn through parts of the Turahalli Reserve Forest in South Bengaluru, blowing thick smoke throughout high-rise apartments and raising fears over the survival of this last wilderness in the city. And the fire, that started around 6:00 p.m., burned several acres of undergrowth and dry foliage before forest officials and local volunteers could hold it back until late at night.
The Inferno: How It Happened
Residents at 80-Feet Road in Banashankari 6th Stage, where fire took to the upper part of the valley through all the fire, had seen the flames come up high up and out of the valley on the upper part of the 590-acre forest. It was at 7:30 p.m. an urgent command call came from Bengaluru Urban Forest Division and the Kaggalipura Range with a team of local residents that were out for the fire at Turahalli Tree Park. Due to the fact the fire was in a hillock with no side roads in the hilly area we had a hard time getting into it, so we had to use fire tenders,” said a senior forest official.
After nearly six hours of intense firefighting, the fire was extinguished by midnight and the fire was controlled. So far a few local people have said they think that the fire was started by “miscreants who simply got on the grass either accidentally with cigarette butts or intentionally just to scare off the wildlife like leopards and spotted deer that live in the reserve. “The forest we have been able to find that the current rains did not allow for the fire not to develop into a mass disaster, the forest still does have a lot of water in it when we are able the rain we are going to get last week it is very moist” he said.
And yet not only the repeated frequency of such ‘man-made’ fires that hit nature’s habitats has frustrated people for decades but even those that no one should miss as of this year’s previous year we still see a lot of birds out here at our disposal. The ecological destruction is a severe blow to bird safety over ground-nesting birds as well as soil quality in the dry deciduous forest.
So far no fatal animal casualties have been documented but residents and volunteers from “Clean Up Turahalli” (CUT) have long been calling for more security, cameras and better fencing along with more guards at work for the forest. The latest sighting of the undergrowth-eating beetle and fire has also given us an alarm that the green space around Bengaluru in general is under assault with constant urban encroachment and seasonal arson.
