Income for the poor through planting trees!
SM Raju is a civil servant in the Indian state of Bihar who has taken a novel approach to improve the poors life circumstances and at the same time enhance the environment for generations to come. What he calls “social forestry programme” takes advantage of the central government’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), which is designed to provide the members of families that live below the poverty line with employment for an income of 100 Rupees per day for 100 days in a year. In Bihar 44% of the population fall into this category and the programme is said to have significantly improved the condition of thousands of families and to have even stopped the migration of poor labourers from the area in search of employment elsewhere during monsoon time.
Image courtesy Prashant Ravi / BBC
According to a report by BBC from September 19th, 2009 with the title ” Meeting India’s tree planting guru”, SM Raju organised 300′000 villagers from 7′500 Villages from Bihar state in a mass tree planting ceremony held on August 30th, 2009. As per the BBC report the target was the plantation of one billion trees within a single day from 6 am to 6 pm. However, I think this amount stated is incorrect.
Existing World record from June 2009 in Assam claims 447,874 trees planted by 300 army personnel within 24 hours. That makes roughly 1.16 trees on average planted per minute by each (physically fit) army man on well prepared ground.
Pakistan snatched the title with 541,176 trees planted by 300 volunteers in July, however they were mangrove trees which could easily be plugged into the very soft marshland.
Calculate the Bihar claim: 1 billion trees divided into 300000 people into 12 hours into 60 minutes equals 4.63 trees per participant planted every minute without a single break! – difficult to believe. Maybe the target was ONE CRORE trees and it can be assumed that BBC made a mistake with translating the term “crore” (1 crore = 10 million) with “billion” as “crore” is a rather unknown term outside India (?).
Anyway – every tree counts! (and if they create jobs for the poor – even better!)
