Radhika Anand has planted 110,000 trees

Radhika Anand, CEO of Delhi-based Plantology, has planted 110,000 fruit trees in a single year across army cantonments in Delhi, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Maharashtra and Rajasthan.

Anand has worked for the protection of the environment for close to two decades now. Last year, she wanted to do something impactful and thus tried her hand at waste management but was unable to make any breakthrough. That's when the idea of planting fruit trees struck her.

To fulfil her dream, Anand first approached the Delhi government which said that while this was a brilliant idea, where was the land? She then went to the central government which said it had no funds for this. According to Anand, a senior officer asked who would water the plants. She then approached the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry which too was unable to help her. That's when she decided to self-fund the project, Mission Falvan, with her own earnings.

So where did the land come from? "I had a chance encounter with an army officer while on a train from Delhi to Chandigarh, and discussed this project. He seemed pretty interested and told me that he'll take it up with the concerned people," says Anand. "As it transpired, the army responded almost immediately to tell me that it will provide the land."

The first planting took place on July 28, 2015, in Ludhiana, and then Anand moved to other cantonments like Jalandhar, Amritsar and Gurdaspur. All told, 25,000 trees were planted in Punjab: mango, tamarind, jamun and gooseberry.

It costs Rs 15 to plant a tree. According to Anand, it began at Rs 40 but as the scale of her operations expanded the price began to fall: first to Rs 25 and then to Rs 15. She hopes that in due course of time, even this figure will come down.

Anand sourced the saplings from Saharanpur and Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh and Abohar in Punjab. The upkeep of these trees is done by the army jawans who also get to keep the produce. According to Anand, these trees have 100 per cent survival rate. "If every tree is a fruit tree, it solves so many problems. There are birds and monkeys who come into our houses, our terraces, but do we understand it is also because we have been taking their habitat away from them?"

Anand has certainly come a long way as an environmentalist, so it may come as a surprise that Anand's career was meant to head elsewhere: she studied economics from Panjab University, taught the subject at DAV College in Chandigarh, and then joined the International Management Institute in Delhi as a research associate. A life-threatening health episode while at the institute made her take up the cause of the environment.

She admits that it was something which probably always existed in her genes. Her father, an Air Force Officer, had done his post-graduation in botany and had harboured ambitions of becoming a botanist. And her grandfather was a forest officer who was in the habit of nurturing plants step by step.

Anand, the wife of an ex-banker who retired promptly at 40, has no intention of entering the record books with her initiative, but says she was "absolutely delighted that on July 28 not only was her target of 100,000 trees in a year achieved but 10,000 extra trees were planted." She says that planting trees is her life and that's what she will be doing till the day she dies.