Bangalore: They create forests for a living

In this age of protest marches and online campaigns demanding reform, a bunch of youngsters have chosen to make the change they want to see. For the last four years, this team of environmental engineers has been helping individuals and corporates in India and abroad create forests in the open spaces they own.

Trees twice as tall as you, wild bulbuls on the branches, clean, cool air — it is hard to believe that the thick greenery before your eyes wasn’t there two years ago, or that you are on a private plot of land on the outskirts of Bangalore. This is one of the forests created by Afforestt, a company set up by the biodiversity enthusiasts.

“The idea is to leave the earth a better place than you found it,” says Shubhendu Sharma, the brain behind Afforestt, which he describes as an “end-to-end service provider for creating natural, wild, maintenance-free, native forests”.

Sharma was working as an industrial engineer with Toyota Kirloskar Motor Private Limited when he got the idea. He attended a talk in Japan by vegetation ecologist Akira Miyawaki, who has planted over four crore trees. Thoroughly impressed, Sharma volunteered for Miyawaki’s afforestation project at the Toyota campus in Bidadi, Karnataka. “That was in 2008. We planted 1.6lakh trees in 13 acres. Every day I would watch them grow, and every month I photographed them to document their growth. In the eighteenth month, I decided this was what I was going to do for the rest of my life,” Sharma recalls.

Sharma started with the backyard of his own house in Kashipur, near Nainital. Following the Miyawaki methodology, he tested the soil to find out the nutrient content, studied the native forests of the region, sourced saplings of close to 100 native species, tilled the land mixing organic manure with the soil, and got the locals — his parents, friends, relatives and even the electrician who came to repair the meter — to plant the saplings. “While much of this forest-making looked like jugaad to outsiders, I was closely monitoring and documenting it as a six-sigma complaint operation like all the Toyota projects I had worked on. After two years, on that 4,000sqft plot of land, we had a small dense forest of 1,200 trees taller than our house. It is entirely maintenance-free and self-sustaining. We see wild birds and small animals we had never seen earlier.”

Sharma then roped in a few like-minded professionals and set up Afforestt on Jan 1, 2011. Their first client came after a long wait as the market for afforestation is still in a nascent stage. A furniture manufacturer, Massiv Konzept, in Germany signed on Afforestt to plant ten trees for every tree made into furniture by the company. Their second project was a forest of 12,000 trees for the Toyota campus in Pune, and the next one was at a house in Whitefield. By now, they have created 17 forests for individuals and corporates.

“If we squeeze the 4.5 billion years that the earth has been around into a single year, a human lifetime would be equivalent to 0.07 seconds, and that is one tenth of the time it takes to blink. That’s all the time you have. You can choose to criticise, protest, simply pass time or do something substantial to leave the earth a better place than you found it,” says 27-year-old Sharma, a 2012 INK Fellow.

HOW TO GROW A FOREST

The Miyawaki method aims for a dense, wild forest in just 10 years. Sounds incredible? The trick lies in planting 50-100 native species, which would neither dominate nor die in the region. The forest would be multi-layered with shrubs, sub-trees, canopy and large trees. It needs to be watered only for the first two years, and since the forest comprises native species, the ground water does not get sucked up unnaturally either. With a 92% survival rate for the planted trees, the forest is created 10 times faster than in nature.

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