In a recent article, the author and journalist Manu Joseph used the term “Low-stakes niceness” to describe the act of feeding animals that most Indians indulge in. We will borrow his term to extend it to another favourite activity of the environmentally conscious Indian – tree planting.
For decades, it has been drilled in to us that planting trees is the “green” thing to do, a very large band-aid to the thousands of cuts that we’ve inflicted on the environment. To atone for the environmental sins of razing large tracts of primary forests, India has committed to having a third of its total land area, or 95 million hectares, under forest and tree cover by 2030. With the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration (2021-30) and other global commitments, mass tree-planting campaigns are often seen as a solution to mitigate the climate crisis by both government and non-government entities.
Successive governments, both at the centre and at the state have taken to this with missionary zeal, each vying for their place under the shady canopies of the millions of trees they’ve sought to plant. In 2017, the Tamil Nadu government planted 68 lakh tree saplings across the State to mark the then Chief Minister Jayalalitha’s 68th birthday. On the CM’s 69th birthday, the government executed another plantation drive to plant 69 lakh trees. Not to be left behind, in 2018, the Maharashtra government planted 13 crore trees in a month. Similar initiatives have been carried out by many other states including Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, and Rajasthan. While these efforts have attracted praise from the masses and the media, it is worth scratching the surface of the shiny tree bark to see if tree-planting activities have really been successful in India, both in terms of ecological and social parameters.
