As a group of school children and their teachers walk out of a bus to a barren patch of rocky land at Raioli outside Balasinor, a small town about 86 km from Ahmedabad, Aaliya Babi of the Garden Palace of Balasinor whips out a brush and removes a layer of loose mud to reveal fossilised remains of a bone among the rocks. In an hour, she points out dinosaur bones, teeth, scales and traces on the soil, bringing alive what the children may have mistaken to be rocks.
“Since this fossil site fell in the Balasinor Princely State, of which my father was the nawab at the time of Independence and accession, I got interested in preserving this heritage of our land. I spoke to officials, policy-makers and tourism officials to get support for preserving this site,” explains Aaliya. “My efforts are yielding business too. Balasinor is swiftly coming on the global map as a destination for palaeontologists and others interested in the study of dinosaur fossils. It has also become an educational field trip destination for schools and colleges.”
The Babi family entered the tourism business a couple of decades ago. “In the mid-90s, my father M Salabat Khan Babi, the erstwhile nawab, decided to open one room in our Garden Palace as a homestay. At the time, our primary focus was on culinary tourism. Since our main palace was lost to fire many decades ago, we grew up in the Garden Palace, which is set in fruit orchards and farms. Our mother, Farhat Sultana, the erstwhile Begum of Balasinor, is an excellent cook.”
As they opened more rooms for tourism, Aaliya and her brother Salauddin realised they live in an area with an exceptional cache of fossil remains from the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago or earlier. Balasinor has been talked about in paleontological circles from the 80s, when geologists stumbled upon dinosaur bones and fossils here. The number of eggs here makes paleontologists believe this was an important dinosaur hatchery towards the end of the Cretaceous period. The bones and crest of a dinosaur discovered here during the 980s was identified a new genus of dinosaur by American and Indian scientists, and named Rajasaurus Narmadensis.
Their efforts got a shot in the arm when Balasinor became a destination for travellers on ultra-luxurious excursion train, The Maharajas’ Express, five years ago. The train focuses on Rajasthan between October and April. It stops to show tourists the palaces of Vadodara, which was one of the premier 21 gun salute princely states of India, and the medieval citadel of Champaner, a World Heritage Site. “As we are about 90 minutes from Champaner and two hours from Vadodara by road, Balasinor became part of a triangle for the day excursion, highlighting the remains of seven dinosaurs in Raioli,” says Salauddin.