If you’ve ever felt like doing your bit to improve the environment, but have never really had the time to actually do anything, here is an option for you.
SankalpTaru is an online platform that allows you to plant trees across the country. With the click of a button you can not only help increase green cover, but also help rural communities become more sustainable!
Founder Apurva Bhandari, a former IT professional from the city, says that are they are trying to reduce the gap between a person’s desire to improve the environment and the physical action required to make it happen. “People would like to plant trees, especially corporate professionals, but they don’t get time to do so,” he says, “So we have created an online portal, through which people can have trees planted in remote places. As soon as the tree is planted, they can track it using GPS on Google Earth maps.”
With the payment of a nominal fee of Rs 149 on the online site, you can have your own sapling planted in one of the many projects listed. With the help of rural coordinators in Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Leh-Ladakh in J&K and other states — who work with farmers, students, and other beneficiaries — your sapling is planted, labelled, geo-tagged and photographed. You get an email with the details. The money that you pay the NGO trickles down to the workers and farmers at the ground level, who use the money for buying saplings and maintaining the tree.
Maintenance of trees has been a key hurdle in India. Bhandari says, “We have developed our model to incentivise people to actually take care of the trees. The farmer needs to know that the tree he takes care of will become part of his 50-100 fruit bearing trees and bring income. In three years the trees become a source of income for the farmer.”
SankalpTaru is a non-profit organisation that also plants trees in schools to make the campuses greener. Over 2,55,000 trees have been planted in two years. The survival rate of the trees is 95-98 per cent. Since most of the work is done through a web portal, the organisation plans to go global in the next two years.
