Pravin Bhagwat is an IITK batchmate of Samir Palnitkar. Pravin spent a long time working with the Watson Labs at IBM. He was IBM’s representative in meetings that evolved the wireless standards for the computing industry – the blue tooth. There was a lot of haggling that went on between companies that were involved. And the name bluetooth is symbolic of Pravin – who was the ringmaster in these battles. BlueTooth was actually a 13th century Norwegian king, who got together a lot of fledgling kingdoms and created Norway as we know it today. Pravin got bitten by the entrepreneurial bug post IBM. Pravin and Samir were partners at Mojo Networks. Both have since exited the company. 

Pravin has taken a sabbatical from business and for the last 6 months has been a full timer at 14 trees farm. Pravin’s mission: help India get back its forest cover. 1/5th of our land is denuded grasslands. The land wasn’t always like this; the culprits: grazing, cutting and burning. Pravin feels that as a society, you cannot expect government to provide solutions for your past sins. You need to take charge yourself – and do your own bit for restoring the environment. After all, its your consumerism which has led to deforestation. The name 14 trees came from an Excel spreadsheet that Pravin was playing around with. You need to plant 14 trees, to nullify the CO2 that you have breathed out in your life. 

Pravin has set himself an ambitious target. His own 14 trees got planted many years ago – his mission now is to get 1 lakh people to plant 14 lakh trees. In 2014, Pravin started looking out for land to pilot this mission. After searching for a year, he came across a site near Vetale, Tal Khed, Dist Pune, in the midst of the Sahyadri range. Most of your view of the countryside is formed on the basis on treks that happen in monsoons. But seeing the Sahyadris in the summer tells you the real story of the land. The Sahyadris in Maharashtra are mostly privately owned. After the forefathers had sold off the trees on this land, this generation uses this grassland for pasturing. And the mindset is that if you burn off the grass in summer, the growth is more luxuriant in the monsoon. A sad byproduct: any tree saplings that have come up in the monsoon and survived the winter, are destroyed in these summer fires.

Pravin’s solution is to buy denuded land and get it back to its original forested state. The first 24 acres are in place – and 200 acres are being added shortly. In today’s condition, the water table cannot support forestation activity. Wells and borewells dug on the lands are bone dry. Like every hill slope, his property had streams flowing through, which would dry up as soon as the monsoons got over. So after purchasing the land in 2014, the first 4 years were spent in building check dams and bunds in his property. Some of the bunds would keep the water, some would lose it pretty fast. It is the ones that lose water fast that are the ones that charge your underground aquifers better. The cracks in the ground rock help the surface water reach the underground aquifers. Considering the heat of our country, it is preferable to store the water underground than to let it remain above. 

It took 3 years for his wells to start filling up and now was the time to start planting. Pravin is an ideal student; he requires no teachers. His mantra in life – you have to make your own mistakes. So he did not hire a consultant, he did not read up any books, he did not watch any youtube videos, but he used common sense in deciding when, where and what to plant. The planting season has to be the monsoon. The species had to be local. Most plantations by our local forest departments are designed keeping goats in mind. Forest babudom seem to have resigned themselves to the fact that animals will continue to pasture in forests – so babus only plant stuff that animals hate. So you have entire forests of gliricidia and subabul. This is the deceit that the human eye does not catch so easily. These trees are imports – and invasive. They do not support any local fauna. Pravin is quite uncharitable even to teak. I have been a big admirer of these large-leaved teak trees, but Pravin says that teak does not allow anything to grow around it. (Foresters love it because of its commercial value)

But tarring all forresters with the same brush will not be fair. One of Pravin’s IITK batchmates is in the Forest service in UP. He has promised to help Pravin with a 700 acre forest department tract in Unnao. Pravin’s style is to first execute and then plan. So he has already tied up with a 22 year old Unnao local to start a nursery exclusively for this project. Pravin has committed to buying 25,000 saplings from this local entrepreneur for Rs. 100 each. I thought that this was a little bit on the higher side. But then Pravin explained the deal to me – the entrepreneur will replace any sapling that dies or is eaten up during the first three years. An interesting model, I must say, which aligns the incentive system to what is critical in plantation – survival. Pravin’s survival rate at his own plantations is 99% +. 

At 14 Trees, agriculture is not monoculture. Like humans, trees flourish under conditions of diversity. For this diversity to sustain you have to ensure that the young saplings are given a chance to grow up. Vetale villagers were used to letting their animals roam around on the hills that are today 14 Trees. So fencing was put in. Pravin’s self taught gyan told him that he must be hyperlocal. So the fence was made of bamboo, sourced locally – and was made with labour that is local. The one thing that Pravin has not been able to do manually is the ditch digging. Most of the rock is volcanic – and he has had to blast and use JCBs for creating his ponds. But the rest of the work is non automated by design. There is an adivasi basti not very far from the farm – and today about 65 people from this basti are employed as daily wage workers at 14 trees. 

In spite of all this, it has not been hunky-dory with his neighbours always. The first parcel of land that he purchased had a clear legal title, but the family that sold it had some internal disputes. A recent court ruling has mandated that daughters have an equal right in ancestral property. In case of this plot, the daughter exercised her rights – went to court – and the court ruled in her favour. She was given 4 acres of land as her share of the family property – and having had a clear inheritance, she went on to sell it to Pravin. When Pravin started visiting this land, he got threats from the land owner’s brother to vacate the land. Pravin was reassured by his lawyer that he had full legal rights – and paid no heed to the threats. And then one night, a few weeks after his plantation had happened, the entire property was set ablaze. All his trees were razed. Pravin approached one of his IITK batchmates, who was an IG in the Maharashtra Police, for help. Within hours the culprit was summoned to the local police station and given a strong warning – and Pravin gained a singham reputation in Vetale. No one takes panga with him anymore. 

Scaling up a brick and mortar business is not the easy as scaling up in IT. Although Pravin’s local team is strong, to scale up he needs to build the team. I am pretty sure that he will be able to raise funds, but execution will require his tree army to have more generals. His approach has been to raise a territorial army; of finding people to come and volunteer time for this project. Pravin is quite upfront about the quality of ditch digging of the engineers who have visited his farm. Their work pales in comparison to the wonderful work done by his local adivasi youth. I would be happier with more full timers. Young energetic folks, who can come up with their own initiatives. Pravin will be a great mentor to such people. There has been total radio silence on Pravin’s work on the internet: no FB, no linkedin, no youtube, nada. His idea is to walk the talk. A lot of people have visited and know of his work, though the last 6 months have seen hardly any visitors, thanks to the pandemic. To start with Pravin needs someone to spearhead the communication effort. This person can be based anywhere in the world, but should be a full timer. Anant, who started off as Pravin’s driver, and now is the manager of 14 Trees, is doing a fantastic job at the farm now – and I think he can become an ideal trek manager – and educator. Pravin will need to find a full timer trainer, who can prepare field staff who will execute. People like Manohar Khake and Neha Singh can help find resources here.

Pravin has tinkered around with a few models for fundraising – but the one that seems to work the best has again got its roots again in MS Excel. In 2020, Pravin put down his costs on a spreadsheet – the money that had gone in to buy the land, build the ponds, raise the saplings, transplant them, water them for the first three years. He divided this cost with the number of trees he had planted on them. The math is it costs Rs. 3,000 per tree. Land represents the biggest cost in this project. Pravin is also tinkering around with a model, where he does not have to buy the land. If you have land he will do the forest for you. All he wants you to do is to pledge that you will not touch the trees. His neighbours have now started paying heed to his work. Some of them have now allowed him to do his plantation activities in their plots. Even the local forest department has given him permission to plant trees in the forest area. Fencing their properties is not something that is legally advisable – so what Pravin does is he fences the plants instead. His bamboo workshop churns out environmentally friendly tree guards which are designed to last the three years that the sapling requires to become independent. As with any plantation, the first two years are spent in preparing the land – by ditch digging etc. His Excel spreadsheet tells him that the cost per tree now falls down to Rs. 1,500. Of course, since he does not have control of the land, there is no guarantee of how long the trees would stay.

Another challenge in scaling up is to be able to find investors who are going to be happy with non financial rewards. We had a long chat on what would motivate people to become investors. For his IITK batchmates, it’s a no brainer. They know of Pravin’s integrity and commitment. So when he asks you to do something for the environment, as the Nike guys say – Just Do It. Pravin  already has 1400 tree commitments from his IITK batchmates. IITK is celebrating its diamond jubilee this year. Pravin is in talks with IITK to plant a sapling for each of the 40,000 alums of the institute. I hope that COEP will follow in IITK’s footsteps soon.

https://samirpalnitkar.blogspot.com/2020/09/visit-to-14-trees-pravin-bhagwat-sat.html

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fX8VJDMYWLrFfrvWo70hyf3ThpgPyOAo/view

Pravin’s Oxygen Factory 

Made the second trip to 14 Trees on 27-Apr. The difference was noticeable, right from the Rajgurnagar turn-out for Vetale village. An army of trees awaiting you as soon as you take the left turn. Troops standing 10 feet apart, attired in their individual bamboo tree guards. Wonder about alternate material that can be used for tree guards instead of bamboo. We have a huge consumption of raw coconuts in cities; can we use them in some way. Or coconut fronds? Bamboo, per se, is environmentally appropriate. It is grown in the local jungles – and till now Pravin has been lucky that he has got the permission to harvest from there. Unfortunately, the forest department is not renewing permissions now. He has started planting bamboo in the land, but it will take 3-4 years to be harvesting ready. He needs help with local suppliers in the Rajgurunagar area. 

My friend Vijay Chheda had a question for Pravin: why are the guards square and not circular. Pravin’s initial design was indeed a cheaper circular cane one – supported with two vertical bamboos. But it turned out that the circular design is not goat proof. A little bit of heading by our friends brings down the guard – and ensures a feast that is the end of the sapling. The square design, though costlier, is sturdier. The other advantage of the square design is that transportation is easier, as it gets shipped with 4 sides separated. 

We discussed spacing of the trees. Ideally it should be 15 ft, but Pravin has chosen to go with 10 ft,  as it is cost effective from a land utilisation perspective. One math question that comes to mind – how many trees in an acre? Each tree can be seen to be at the centre of a circle of area 100 sq ft. So about 40,000/100 = 400 trees can be planted in one acre. But as you have gaps between the circles, the number comes down – and the realistic one that Pravin has arrived at is 300 trees per acre.

Apart from the 5,000 odd trees that will form a green tunnel between the Nasik highway and Vetale village, there has been good work done on a plateaued plot that has been added to Pravin’s forest zone. Today there is a team of 85 local people at work in the 14 trees project. Pravin tries his best to use muscle power over machine power. But his other constraint is time. Pravin is a man in a hurry. He needs to scale fast. So he has been getting machines to do the trenching and reservoir building. 

Volcanic rock dominates the plateau. One of the things that volcanic rock teaches you, is to use dynamite – because even JCBs can’t dig this kind of rock. The good news is that most of the rock is impermeable – so rainwater stays in. He showed us a reservoir, which has not been tapped for watering. And the good news is that it has lost only 2 ft of its initial 17 ft of water level in the 6 months since the monsoon got over. What helps is the reduced radiation load because of the depth. There is a lot of science in our ancient practice of wells. Btw, even if there are evaporation losses, it helps the trees surrounding it with air irrigation. And if it seeps down, it helps recharge underground reservoirs. So no matter what happens, digging reservoirs is a no brainer.

We wanted to invite Pravin to help with forestation activities in Vijay Chheda’s plot in Shirwal. Pravin’s current model is that of crowdfunding. So he was hesitant in starting work in privately owned land. In crowdfunded land, he has a clear mission – the trees are as much non profit as his NGO is. And if at all something happens to the NGO, the land, along with the trees, will get transferred to the forest department. So what are his views on foresting private land? He wants a bullet proof agreement with the land owner – and the next 10 generations of the owners – that they will not sell the land or cut the trees. How enforceable will such agreements be in courts of law? 

A lot of you have helped him getting the current project in place. Pravin is rightly proud of the fact that the administrative costs are zero. All the money that comes in goes into trees. Not into salaries of managers and Google Ad word campaigns. Pravin expects the program to be driven by volunteers. The money is coming in, but what is required at this juncture is volunteer time. The time can be spent in the forest. Or the time could be spent – in helping spread the message. The volunteers could be folks interested in becoming weekend farmers. They could be retired folks. They could be school children who are looking at doing their bit for their own generation.

Last week a family friend, Brig HSN Sastry, passed away of Covid. My sister’s father-in-law failed his Covid challenge, and also breathed his last this week. As I was visiting the forest in Vetale, I got news about my mom’s sister passing away in Delhi. She was not in good health for the past few years. The family went through an immense struggle in getting her oxygen. The good news is that she did not die because of lack of oxygen. But we all know of others who did. 

Our planet today is suffering from the same problem as its people. The planetary lungs are choked. And the most VFM oxygen producing facility is the tree. The best way to protect a forest is to invite and involve various social groups into building it. Once people have their ‘named trees’ standing on the land, social pressure will automatically build for keeping the asset protected forever. Conservation is possible when people start ‘caring’ for what we want to protect. Planting trees in the name of our loved ones, is one way to make a beginning. So I have taken a decision – that I will sponsor one tree in the name of each of my senior friends: Brig Sastry, Omprakash Bhatia and Pratibha Khattar. If you are someone like me, who has survived Covid, I would be happy to invite you to come to Vetale and plant your tree yourself. 

The oxygen factory’s website: https://14trees.org/

Bhagwat Gita @ Peepal Tree,  21-May-21

When you go on a typical train journey, most of the time the scenery that rolls past you is that of khets and khaliyans. And wherever there is no farming, you have a barren treeless landscape. There were trees there at some time. But they have all been cut. 65% of India’s land is classified as agricultural. This percentage is amongst the highest in the world. But about half of this land is agricultural, only in name. Indian laws mandate that if a land has a title of private ownership, it is deemed to be agricultural. Barren agricultural land accounts for 32% of the Indian land mass. A completely useless resource. Two years ago, 33 cr trees were planted by government agencies. The 130 cr (aka Indian population) question: How many survived? 

We are in the middle of a huge water crisis. I was watching an AlJazeera documentary on Karachi’s water mafia. One of the aerial shots from the documentary has stayed on in my mind. A huge swathe of concrete – with nary a tree in sight. Desalination plants which generate even more CO2 will create short term solutions. Trees and forests are the only long term solution. Reforestation has to become a citizen’s movement. Barren lands can be transformed into forests – generating employment and economic activity. 14 trees’ charter is to work on the restoration of these barren lands. One of the Peepal Tree teachers asked Pravin, what help is 14 Trees foundation planning to take from the government for the forestation challenge that it has taken up. Pravin’s philosophy: is ALAP,  As Little As Possible. 

Forestation is a problem of human management. The crib of the agricultural poor is ‘We don’t have food to eat, leave us alone to take care of our own survival. Grazing, burning are all part of the survival game for the rural poor. These are problems that need to be solved. Germany has been helping conserve forests in Brazil. What can happen at national levels, can also be done at local levels. Scale is important, we need a replicable model. 14T started off as Pravin’s hobby a few years ago. But now the idea is to scale up this hobby using private and roadside land, because these are situations where the sarkaari babu’s interference is the least. Pravin thinks that an AirBnB model will work for the environment. In AirBnB, we are talking of houses: people who have places to rent – and people who want to rent those places for short times. The 14T model is that there are folks who want to plant trees and there are folks who own barren lands where these trees can be planted. 14T is a platform to connect the two.

In India, humans believe with their eyes. To spread the reforesting movement, demo plots are important. The presence of a mini forest, nudges the neighbouring barren land owners as well the local volunteers who want to get involved in tree plantation. Most people feel that around Pune, land is so pricey that creating a private forest is next to impossible. Most 14T trees do not produce economic returns. The forest department shoots you down in friendly fire. At 14T’s Vetale site, neighbours would burn the dried vegetation every year. This would spread to 14T’s juvenile foresting site, and saplings would die. When forest department officials were approached, they could only empathize: ‘grass burning is a deep rooted practice, we cannot do anything..’

Cut to 6 years later, the forest is now visible. At 14T tree survival rates are almost 100%. One of the key reasons: every tree has an identity. A human’s name gets attached to it the day it’s planted. And human emotions get attached to our green friends. In the Rajgurunagar Vetale roadside plantations, 6500 names of locals are attached to trees. 14T doesn’t want even a single planted tree to die. The 2-4% that suffer infant mortality, get replaced. 14T treat trees as humans, not statistics. The Vetale forest land bank is now at 150 acres. 22,000 trees have been planted. Ecological society of India surveys on the 14T land sighted 15 species of birds in 2013. The count is 68 now. Local tribals, who were daily wage workers at the neighbouring Chakan industrial area, had lost jobs because of the Covid induced manufacturing slowdown. 105 of these young (and some not so young) men and women come to work at the 14T site! The original jungle cutters are now the planters! 14T works with 8 local gram panchayats. And with 70 individual farmers. Remember Pravin’s neighbour who liked burning his land? He is now part of this 70! Ironically, Pravin has been approached by the sarkaari Rajguru water supply department to forest land around the reservoirs. Time is the best teacher. 

At 14T, 70 varieties of trees were planted, all local to the Sahyadri region. Help from the Ecological Society of India was taken to develop a local tree catalog. Bamboo will be growing at the boundaries. Bamboo is also used to make the tree guards. No barbed wire is used in the project, as Pravin wants only natural products to be used. If you ask local farmers, they want only Alphonso mango trees planted on their lands. Convincing them to build forest ecosystems with native varieties is going to be a challenge. How can these native ecosystems generate economic returns for these poor landowners? I think there will have to be some scope for commerce in the 14T forestry project. I can think of forest products like bamboo, honey, gums, lac, tendu leaves, and fruits. Without overdoing any single variety. My guess is that it takes about 10 acres of forests to meet the survival needs of one family. Today the poor definitely don’t have such land holdings. How do we do social engineering to achieve economic sustainability?   

One of the civil engineering problems in forestation is creating water bodies to store the rain water for sustaining the young trees in the harsh summer months. There is no ground water in Vetale. The 50 years experience of even the local senior citizens was that water cannot be stored at Vetale. There was a generational memory loss of folks who had never seen forests in the area. Most Vetale farmers bring piped water from the neighbouring dam. 14T does not take dam water. If they do that, the Vetale experiment will not be replicable. So the reliance has to be on rainfed ponds. Reducing rainwater runoff, also has the added advantage of top soil retention. 

One pond costs about 3 lakh today. The size is about 30 by 30 by 30 ft – more like a well. No cement is used to line the pond, keeping the environment as close to nature as possible. You use a JCB and in some cases blast the rocks. Not every pond stores water. Pravin believes that you don’t lose in pond creation. If ponds store water great, if not, water percolates to recharge underground reservoirs. Good spots for ponds are depressions and natural water streams. In most cases, Pravin finds that the right spots are not owned by 14T. Getting permissions at those sites for pond digging is a nightmare. So 14 T uses a First dig and then ask policy. Pravin loves disputed lands. Covid is a blessing – as people are generally ensconced at home. By the time they get out, the ponds have been dug. The dispute now shifts from lands to ponds! But a pond is a better asset than land. So no one is unhappy. No resistance so far. In the last 7 months, the number of ponds at Vetale has gone up from 15 to 46. And some of the ponds are sustaining water till May. My friend Rahul Rajan had an interesting comment about ponds. Every once in a while he browses Google maps – and finds a random water body – and cycles there. Pravin’s suggestion to Rahul – pick up a random spot – and help create a water body there.

Another interesting engineering debate that goes on is about tree density. Pravin usually gets asked his opinion about dense forests, a method favoured by Akira Miyawaki, and adopted by Shubendu Sharma in Bangalore. Here is what wikipedia says about the Miyawaki Method:

• Collecting a large number of native seeds.
• Germination in a nursery 
• If land is very degraded, then addition of organic matter/mulch. 
• Dense plantation of very young seedlings (but with an already mature root system: with symbiotic bacteria and fungi present) Density aims at stirring competition between species 

Pravin feels that the Miyawaki method is suited for small patches of urban forests. You have to dig 5 ft. into the soil. Bring in fertile soil, coco peat and organic fertiliser. And then arrange for water. From a carbon footprint perspective, it is expensive. So not good for large scale forestation. (Neha charges Rs. 500 per tree.) Having said that, 14T is doing two patches of Miyawaki this year as an experiment. 

Alok was interested in understanding the financial model for 14T. Pond digging is an expensive proposition. One pond supports a thousand trees. 300 trees per acre is the norm. So 3 acres per pond. Then there are other costs like labour, organic fertiliser, treeguards and name plates. The biggest cost is land – a grown up tree requires 100 sq ft of space. For Vetale, that works out to about Rs. 1500 per tree. So it costs 14T, Rs. 3000 to sustain a tree over 3 years. After that the maintenance is 0. The 14T financial model is evolving. A section 80G trust is in place. FCRA registration has been applied for. 

Alok wanted to know why 14T is not working more in areas where land is cheaper, for example Rajasthan. Pravin was perfectly ok with the suggestion. But he feels the way to expand is to start by identifying a strong local anchor for a project. Goes without saying that tree species local to Rajasthan would have been chosen  – Babul for example would dominate – it can survive with almost no water. Wonder whether we can just concentrate on not buying land – but doing some kind of bhoodan. Maybe a 50% sharing by landowners, so that the sense of ownership will be there. 

Though Pravin likes to learn from his own experiences, Nilesh Hiremath advised him to visit the  Belgaum village of KattanBavi, where the rustic Shivaji Kagnikar has done excellent reforestation work on similarly denuded land. It was as difficult to find water there. It took 10 years for Shivaji to discover what trees grow better in the hillside terrain that he works on. You can watch Shivaji talking about his work here. Giri spoke about the work that his Rotary club is doing on water conservation by repairing leaking dams, in collaboration with Padmakar (Bandu) Bhide. Pravin is already working with the Prakash Gole founded Ecological Society. Would be a good idea to have a space for sharing and learning across these NGOS. Where folks can jointly create an open source environment movement aka open source software. Where folks contribute to add value with no commercial angles. As one of the participants philosophised: In places that are clean, no one spits. In the same vein, in places that are green, no one burns. Where the contribution is for the pure joy of doing that work. A wikipedia moment for the environment!

Pravin, in his treks around the area, has identified 25 sq km of barren land in the neighbourhood, which is under private ownership. The ambitious target Pravin has set for 14T is to green all of that. So 14T is looking for volunteers, who can spend one full day. Maybe once a month, once a quarter or even once a year. Day trips to Vetale are encouraged, unless you are a leopard lover, who is welcome to get along her own tent and pitch it up in the Vetale jungle to enjoy the nocturnal feline’s company. There are 2 ‘safe’ rooms in the farm – but it is for the 2 guys who stay full time at the farm. Methinks Pravin and company should be able to arrange for accommodation. We can coordinate with the locals for a homestay kind of facility. 

Pravin does not require too much physical work from volunteers. Urban guys just cannot match the neighbouring adivasis in physical productivity. Different people have different interests. It could be Communication, It could be documentation. 14T tries to match the interests of the volunteers with ongoing 14T projects. Was very thrilled to see my friend Manoj Deshpande committing to volunteer once a month. Manoj runs Myelin, an edutech company.  Before that he was head of the sustainability practice at Infosys. The best way to decide whether you want to volunteer is to visit Vetale sometime.

14T Notes, 6-Jun

About 15 folks landed up. 6 on cycle. Rest by car. Getting the electric cycles was a good idea, as we did not feel fatigued at the end of an iron man style 125 km ride and 5 km trek. We met Hemant Joshi and Kiran Deshpande on our way in. They had waited to meet with us, but we had been delayed by a puncture, so we reached at 1000 hrs, instead of 0930. These guys had stayed overnight in a tent, but a midnight downpour had made them scurry for cover – and the poor guys had hardly had any sleep. So they did not take up our offer to stay back for some more chai with us. 

At 0800 hrs in the morning, most puncture shops were closed. The open ones that I had approached considered it infra-dig to repair a cycle flat. So when Mohammed Haider, who operates a puncture shop very close to the Vetale turnout, agreed to repair the bike, we were relieved. (Add location here). We told Mohammed that we are going to meet the madman of 14T who has vowed to green the region. Our philosophical puncture wallah remarked – ‘History is only  written by mad men.’ When Mohammed finished his work, I was willing to give whatever he asked for. I thrust a 500 rupee note in his hand, and said: take what you want. He refused to accept any payment for his work, saying that if you really want to pay me then, ‘Mere naam pe bhi ek ped laga dena’. Next time, we will take him along, and actually get him to plant the tree – with his name next to it.     

On reaching 14T, we had a quick breakfast and did the trek to the plateau. Visited two ‘van’s that I had not seen before. The Gurukul Batch of 20 Garden and the Memorial Garden. We need to demarcate trails with boards so that people can later on go on hikes on their own. Got an interesting insight into pond formation. If you have to use explosives to create a pond, then the chances are high it will be a pond that will retain water. If the strata is soft, and can be dug out using a JCB, then the pond will probably be a percolation one.

We had a great lunch as usual. The COEP gang sat under the tree. Did an overdose of the 14T trademarked styvia, mint paan. As a result the tongue got bruised. We assembled in the 14T open air office area afterwards. During the post lunch discussions, Deepa suggested that we look at the costs involved – and see if we can have more bang for the buck coming in. Pravin has a request for 40 k trees coming in from 12 gram panchayats, including the village where Sahyadri school is located. He wants to first get into execution, optimisation he feels can happen later. 

But we still did the cost analysis exercise. The biggest contributors to cost are water and labour. If we can get the villages to contribute on these fronts, then the cost per tree can significantly reduce. Another idea suggested by Deepa was that we should look at some of the village folks who have migrated to the cities, and made it there. They would definitely like to do some work which will help better lives in the village. After all, Vigyan Ashram was also started by Dr Kalbag to do some upliftment in his native village of Pabal.

Deepa is doing some amazing work at Sahyadri. Pravin and Deepa have agreed on a seed barter to start with. She has also promised to get Milind, her better half, to visit next time she comes around to 14T. Milind looks after administration at Sahyadri school – and he has a very good local connect. And there are some villages where 14T and Sahyadri will also do joint work. Goes without saying, Sahyadri school students will be making a trip to 14T when they are back on campus. Deepa feels that we need to get the student’s parents to visit 14T. Most of the parents are well to do – and are environment conscious. Sahyadri alumni can also be invited. They have just completed 25 years, so the older alumni should be in their thirties – and in a position to contribute. 

In fact, Rahul had come along with his friend Ishan, who happens to be a Sahyadri school alum. Rahul suggested that we need to get folks to actually dig holes when they plant trees. Make them empathise more with the work involved in forestation. Though Pravin has a valid point when he feels that each of us should contribute in our strength areas, some physical shramdaan will not be amiss. So if they get some non-walking exercise during their 14T visit, no harm.

Pravin made a call of funds to folks by asking them to use their corporate connect in order to get companies to help with a thousand trees or so. (Btw, the gram panchayat trees will cost only Rs. 1500 per tree, as the land belongs to the village, and does not need to be purchased.) Anant felt that it is better to have smaller business folks coming over – with their employees – and planting one tree in each employee’s name. This is what Umesh Dixit had also done. The ticket size may come down with this approach, but it definitely will help the message spread faster.

One of the stories that Pravin narrated has made some impact on me. It’s about why grass burning happens. The Vetale area is home to a large cattle population. And the most cost effective way to feed is letting our bovine friends roam around in open pasture land around the village. The social norm is that if the land is not being used for agriculture, then it is pasture land. In the earlier days there would be norms of rotational use of pasture land, so that the land gets time to recover. But with increased demand for milk from the denizens of Pune, the pressure has increased to produce more. So all land is being used, all the time. Grass burning happens to reduce species competition. Grass seeds are very hardy, and can survive a fire. Not the case with most other species. Also the quantity of grass seeds in the soil is the highest. So when you burn, you are ensuring that the new biomass that comes up is primarily a mono-cultured grass. And a short term bonanza for the cattle owners. 

In any demand supply problem, we tend to look only at one side of the equation. 14T has been working on the supply side of forests, but if we are also able to work on the demand side, then the equation can also change. What if we are able to convince folks to reduce their milk consumption. What if Dr Sodhi actually takes PETA’s advice and converts Amul plants to start processing soya milk instead of cow milk? The cattle population would go down – and the burning would stop. Hmm. Sounds like a social experiment that’s worth trying. My friend Chetan, who makes soya milk, would be pleased if this works out. Charity begins at home. So I am going to see if I can live for a month without milk products. 

Comment by Deepa: Today’s was a lovely visit, thanks for making the opportunity available. There are a lot of synergies between the two organisations. Our group sees a lot of collaborative studies coming out of the association. It was also lovely meeting all the other members of your group. 

Comment by Rahul: Atul ji, I’ve shortened the link for the Google form for easy communication, even verbally: https://tinyurl.com/14trees

Pravin is requesting feedback for yesterday’s trip. Can you take a minute to fill in this Google form. 

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSexf9DxfOmUJSN7vKzwxBSiDlwfgGHC6dtylSPT2Y4rbdpg1w/viewform

Thanks in advance.

14 Trees Report, 28-29 Jul-21

Was supposed to do a 1 day trip on 28-Jul. But the visit got preponed. Pravin offered that I can stay overnight at 14T. I realised later that this remuneration in kind is offered only to volunteers who complete 100 hours of work. Since I had not done even 10% of that, I jumped at the offer. So we left around 1500 hrs on Wednesday. Had borrowed the Nexon EV from Abhay. Pravin is interested in switching to a vehicle with a smaller carbon footprint and wanted him to get the experience of driving the Nexon EV. The good news is that the Nexon EV could ford the two streams en route to the farm with ease. We could not charge the vehicle at Vetale, as the charging point did not have proper earthing. Hopefully this will get rectified before the Nexon’s next visit. Since we drove with AC off, the vehicle returned efficiency figures of 115 wh per km. So even without charging we could finish a 160 km round trip with juice for another 80 km still left in the tank, oops battery. Pravin is sold – and insha allah he will be booking a Nexon soon. 

Met with a young volunteer, Akash Singh, who accompanied us from Pune. Akash is from Kaptanganj, a small town about 40 km from Gorakhpur. He did his education upto grade 12 in Hindi medium. Went to Kota after his 12th – and prepared for his JEE – also in Hindi medium. Cracked the JEE and went on to do his mechanical engineering from IIT Gandhinagar. Was the Gymkhana secretary and loved life at campus so much that he stayed back for another 2 years as an incubatee. His startup was trying to work on driver ratings – but turned out that there are not too many customers for social goods. Or to put it in Akash’s words – there was a product-market gap. 

A chance meeting with Pravin Bhagwat got him to move away from his startup to join Mojo Networks, Pravin’s company in Pune. Mojo got taken over by Arista Networks, a company in the same space as Cisco. Akash is in the sales function at Arista – and looks after the education sector. At 14 T he is a big fish in a small pond. For 14 T, volunteer management is critical. Pravin believes that 14T will not be in a position to get high calibre team members for many years to come. So the way forward is to get high calibre volunteers and get relatively young interns / freshers to work under them as paid employees. A beginning on this experiment has been made with Akash, who looks after social media management. Akash has hired a team of young UID design graduates to help him. 

We reached around 1700 hrs. Every time I visit, I am surprised at how different the forest appears. 4 more groves have been added since my last visit only two months ago. Monsoon is a time that you can actually see the aquatic system at work. The good news is that almost all the ponds that have been dug have water in them. The mystery about how many turn out to be percolation ponds or storage ponds will be solved only at the end of the monsoon. I thought about my experiment with mini dams in the water streams at Shirwal, and how they all got washed away in the first 10 days of rain. One major insight for our Shirwal project was that percolation ponds next to the water streams are good even for storage, as they will not get broken up by water flow or silted in by the mud that gets carried in water streams.

We had invited Deepa and Milind More from Sahyadri school to join us for dinner. They crossed over from Sahyadri school across the Chas Kaman dam in their tough Maruti Zen and joined us around 1930 hrs. Had heard a lot about Milind, Deepa’s better half. He joined the Indian Navy after his engineering and went down as a submariner. He was deputed to Russia where he was trained on managing nuclear submarines. Was surprised to find that a Russian nuclear sub generates more than 200 MW of power, enough to light a city. (Was told that the Russians actually have done that at times.) The Indian nuclear sub, built by L and T, has a smaller reactor that generates only about 80 MW. Nuclear subs can stay below water for months. I asked Milind about what they do to replenish oxygen supplies? The reactors don’t require oxygen, but the crew does. The sub does not surface, but usually goes close to the surface and sends a tube up to draw fresh air in. This usually happens at night.

Milind looks after administration at Sahyadri. Running a residential school has its own set of challenges. You have to manage the local community, you have to keep the government babus happy and of course you need to have your staff and students taken care of. Milind runs a tight ship. We discussed the 140 kW solar panels that have been installed at the school. I advised him that they can look at LFP storage batteries instead of net metering. As a result of billing policy change – the net in net metering is distorted. Earlier the bill was a consumption net of generation. But in the new formula consumption and generation are billed at separate rates. The generation rate is the lowest quote received by the utility from independent power producers. At this time, it is around Rs. 2 per unit. In contrast, the consumption rate for commercial customers in Pune is in the range of Rs. 10 per unit. 

The gram panchayat of the village where Sahyadri school is located has approached 14 T for tree plantation. Milind has promised to help them with tree watering during the monsoon. Hope that this is the beginning of a long journey together for 14T and Sahyadri. Next time I visit we will plan to also visit Sahyadri to see Deepa’s work going on over there with local farmers.

Milind talked about his participation in an Auroville inspired community living project coming up near the school. The idea is to have about 20 families staying in a 20 acre plot. They have selected a plot which is close to a tribal village, where there are still mud houses. On the subject of tribals, most of 24 T’s workforce is from the local adivasis, the Thakar community. Although Thakars constitute 25% of Vetale’s population, they have no say in the politics of the region – which is dominated by the Maratha community, the major landowners of the area. There is total segregation even in housing, with Thakar settlements being located in small hamlets up in the hills surrounding Vetale. A lot of the 14 T workforce walks 5-6 km from these hamlets to the 14 T Vetale project. You can judge a community by the land that they live on. Banjar land means banjar people. So reforestation means not just making the land fertiles but also a recultivation of mindsets. The land surrounding the hamlets has now started sprouting trees – so there seems to be mindset changes that are happening.

Meandering back to our local Auroville, it is envisaged that the land and assets that come up on it will be owned by the local collective. Based on my experience at Auroville, (you can find my blog here) I wanted to know what are the community’s plans to attract and retain youth. Deepa’s daughter is doing a project at IIT Bombay after she finished her design program at MIT. I hope that she will be a resident. The community is going to attract capital from the initial residents. The resident list is attractive – they have Dr Bhargava from IIT Bombay as one of the initial backers. (There are two professors at IIT Bombay with that surname – one is in metallurgy, the other is in the B school, not sure which of the professors Deepa was referring to.) The community is contemplating offering sweat equity to the younger generation. My suggestion to the community would be to run an incubation center of sorts in the community. With WFH, quite a few businesses are now location agnostic. Should be interesting to see how the community comes up.

Before we realised it, it was already 2200 hrs. Pravin advised Milind that it would be too adventurous to go back to Sahyadri school via the dam route – and instead advised that they should go up to Kadoos and take the Rajgurunagar Wadi road to reach back. They did that and reached home in 45 minutes. Our gossip session continued for an hour more – with tea supply keeping us awake. Yours Truly and Akash then bunked in the beautiful log house next to rice fields. The sounds of water flowing and frog calls serenaded me to sleep. It had been raining quite a bit, so it was cold and the sleeping bag was appreciated. The mosquito net also helped – as I had experienced a fair amount of mosquito attacks in the evening. I do not fancy coating myself in Odomos before I sleep.

Woke up to more rain in the morning. Managed to do my surya namaskars in between the stilts on which the log house is built. Walked over to be greeted by more chai in the morning. There is some construction activity going on at the site. About 10 circular washrooms have come up. I was happy to use an Indian loo in the morning. Am tempted to write about why Indian loos are better than Western ones, but will do it in another blog. Anant Tayde, who looks after day to day management at the site, has been wanting to get his family here. They are ready to shift but only on one condition. They want to stay in a pucca house. They did try the more sustainable bamboo architecture, but were turned off when they had some snakes for company. 

So there are 3 pucca RCC houses coming up on the campus to house the larger team that will be required as the project scales up. I do hope that in future more of the housing that comes up is greener. We should look at involving locals not just in tree plantation, but also building housing.  It’s such a pleasure to walk on the gobar lined floors of traditional Indian houses. Which reminds me that we do have 8 cows at our site. The interesting part is that we don’t milk a single one. All we are asking is bull shit (or maybe cow shit.) Fun fact: Most adivasi communities are not milk drinkers. I have started an experiment with veganism after my last trip to 14T – the good news is that there has been more than 90% compliance on the vegan diet. Pravin is not yet ready to let go of his milked tea. Hopefully he too shall get converted some day. 

We had guests the next day too. A batch of seven 2019 Indian Forest Service officers landed up for breakfast. Pravin has been interacting with Shri Narkhede of the Forest department who had discussed the idea of this visit with Ravinder Wankhede, Chief Conservator of Forests (Education and Training) at Pune. A new batch of seven IFS officers have joined the Maharashtra cadre and are currently in training. Their visit was to learn about how private initiatives can complement government work. After breakfast, we took the team over and showed them part of the project site. The new officers ended their trek with tree plantation and we got them to reflect on what takeaways and action points of their visit. 

Most were impressed by how 14T has been able to involve the locals in the project. And how they have been able to build emotional bridges with the stakeholders. For officers who are used to top down planning, this experiment from the bottom up was something to cheer about. Seeing is believing – and this is one of the reasons why the movement has spread to 60+ surrounding gram panchayats. Future wars are going to be fought over water – and 14 T is showing that this battle is not a zero sum game. Vetale wells have seen an increase in groundwater – so this has meant better agricultural yields. 14 T at an individual level does not generate any positive RoI commercially, but looking at the community as a whole – the frugal investments will yield handsome returns.

Another idea that some of them took away was funding. With government revenues drying up in the pandemic, the idea of approaching individuals and corporates, both in India and outside, to collaborate in forestation is something which appealed to them – and is something that they could experiment with in their own territories. One of them drew an analogy between Pravin Bhagwat and Dashrat Manji – and about how dedicated individuals can make a sustainable difference. And the main difference is in how these individuals are able to team up with investors, the local community and the government. They are not one man armies. One paradigm shift that may happen is the belief of these future leaders of the government that all NGOs are not villains. And foreign funding of NGOs is not always to further selfish causes. 

There were also a few small kaizens that impressed the IFS team. Things like having donor tags on trees to humanize them. Things like attendance and work allocation by photographs. Things like rewarding volunteers in kind with stuff like ticket free access to forests or overnight stays in machans. The last word was by Jaykumaran, a young officer from Rameshwaram, Tamil Nadu. Best to hear the young man in his own style. Here is the link. In Jayraman’s own filmy style he contrasted the arranged marriage that most officers of his cadre have with forests vs the love marriage that has happened with Pravin. Hopefully officers like Jayraman will fall in love with the forests over the years, and not move on to mundane administrative tasks that the IFS’ sibling service, the IAS, is famous for. 

We started back on our return journey after a by now usual cuppa chai post lunch. Black tea for yours truly. We dropped in at a project site at Dakshana foundation.  At 100 acres, it is probably the largest coaching class in the world. And having been in the coaching industry for 25 years, I was surprised that I had never heard of it. Dakshana’s mission is to improve livelihoods through education. Was impressed with the founder Monish Pabrai’s vision. Here is an excerpt from the foundation site:

Mohnish Pabrai is the Managing Partner of the Pabrai Investment Funds. Since inception in 1999 with $1 million in assets under management, Pabrai Investment Funds has grown to over $560 million in assets under management in the 2nd quarter of 2017. The funds invest in public equities utilizing the Munger/Buffett Focused Value investing approach. Since inception, the funds have widely outperformed market indices and most investment managers. A $100,000 investment in Pabrai Funds at inception in 1999 would have been worth $1,207,000 as of June 30, 2017 – an annualized gain of 14.8% (versus 6.3% for the Dow).

Mohnish is the Founder and Chairman of the Dakshana Foundation. Dakshana Foundation is a philanthropic foundation focused on alleviating poverty. Education is the most powerful and enduring weapon to win the battle against poverty. Dakshana is focused on providing world-class educational opportunities to economically and socially disadvantaged gifted students worldwide. The focus is on providing 1-2 years of world-class coaching for IIT and medical entrance exam to gifted, but impoverished students predominantly in rural India.

He uses his value-investor’s need for efficiency and ROI to run Dakshana Foundation. Since Dakshana started operations in 2007, the IITs in India have accepted over 1,539 Dakshana Scholars (out of a total universe of 2,575 Dakshana Scholars) – a success rate of 59.76%. The fully loaded cost per Dakshana Scholar was $3,066 in 2016. When Pabrai first started Dakshana, he estimated that by spending $4,000 per student, he could boost each student’s lifetime income by an average of $158,000.

In addition to providing coaching to scholars in 7 locations throughout India, Dakshana purchased a 109-acre property in 2014 in Ananda Valley, India to develop and create a campus called Dakshana Valley. The campus accepted 250 scholars in 2017, and when fully built out Dakshana Valley will accommodate over 2,000 scholars.

We went across to see the 8000 pits dug on top of the hill in the Dakshana campus. We were happy to see that the two ponds, which are almost at the top of the hill, were full of water. We were worried to see the usual goat grazers. So most likely this site will have to be fenced in. With the ratio of goat herds to goats usually being 1:50, it is not possible for goats to graze responsibly. Grazing is a little bit more manageable with cows or buffaloes. (After the more rigorous implementation of the ban on cow slaughter, there has been a huge migration away from cows to buffaloes amongst the herding communities.) One idea is to allow grazing rights to a select group of herders – and take their help in ensuring that pastures can be managed sustainably – and converted over time to forest land. 

We had a chat with Annu Malik on our return. Annu, btw, is not into music. He is from Haryana and was a student in the second batch at Dakshana. He finished his engineering from NIT Kurukshetra – and has rejoined Dakshana on the engineering side, not as faculty. He was earlier based out of Bangalore. His brief is to get the campus up to scale to welcome 2600 students in a couple of years time. The strength today is around 600.

Dakshana has a tie up with Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas – where they provide free training to JNV students on campus alongside the 11th and 12th curriculum. Unlike the JNV campuses where the teachers have to transit to online teaching, the Ananda Valley campus, which focuses on repeaters, has been able to operate in the offline mode. Dakshana is fortunate that it does not have to deal with too many sarkari babus as their courses are not being run with any affiliations. And being in such a remote location also means that it is away from the glare of mass media.  

Salaries are good in the JEE/ NEET industry – and Dakshana matches industry compensation. Faculty members start at 1.2 lakh per month and can go up to 3 lakh per month. Everyone wears black T shirts on campus and I am not too amused by the choice of color. May be Ok in Monish’s native California, but Indians love white – and for good reason. Interestingly, most of the teachers are old Dakshana students. I am not too happy with that though. All this inbreeding would mean a lack of freshness in mapping out the future. It would also be interesting if Dakshana tries to pick up a select lot of students at an earlier stage in their education – without filtering – and gets them into the IITs and medical colleges. This may probably not be in keeping with Monish’s maximising RoI philosophy, but it would be making a real difference.

14 Trees Note, 23 Oct 21

We started our journey at 0730 hours from Arvind ji;s place in Model Colony. Then went to pick up Manoj from Nagras Road in Aundh. In spite of the early start, we still got caught in a 45 minute traffic jam at Chakan. Makes sense to start at 0600 hrs. That’s when we had started on our cycling trip – and we took almost the same time to reach back. On the return journey, inspired by my cycling route, I decided to head back via Chakan town. This helped avoid the main Chakan bypass traffic jam. Makes sense to standardize on this deviation. Given a chance, I would still prefer the electric cycle ride over the car ride. I could not get the Nexon EV and the Chevrolet Beat  was a pain to drive in 3 hours of traffic jams. 

Met with an interesting set of people. Manoj Deshpande of Myelin accompanied me and Arvind. Should have invited his partner but we had to factor in 2 extra passengers in the return journey. Manoj briefed Arvind ji about his work at Myelin en route.

There is a group of volunteers who look after greening the hills around Baner who were quite impressed with the work done at 14T. And then there was Arvind’s IITK batchmate, Mukund Mavalankar. Mukund’s grandfather was the speaker in India’s first parliament. Mukund joined Tata Motors along with Arvind. After 15 years at Telco, he spent the rest of his career with Bharat Forge. Amongst other things he was also involved in coordinating the CSR activities at Bharat Forge. In between he found time to go and finish his MS. There was a short stint of 4 years that he spent at BPL, Bangalore. He now dabbles in rooftop solar. has done quite a few solar rooftop projects, including one on his own lovely bungalow at Pallod Farms, off Baner Road. He knows Abhay Patwardhan quite well. His wife had come in his nexon EV. Praveen gave a lift to Mukund to Vetale, and his return journey was with us in the Beat. His grandson, who studies at Loyola, accompanied us.

Spent time with Mr Agarwal. He is second batch at IIT Kanpur. Agarwal Ji knew that he could not come in on Sunday with his batchmates, so he decided to make the trip a day earlier. Agarwal Ji started his career in sales with a Birla group company called Universal Cables. Then did a long stint with Crompton Greaves. After which he joined a Ballabgarh company which was making speedometers as head of sales. Got picked up by Bajaj Auto. Landed up in Pune in 1989. And never left. I asked him about the transition from institutional sales to retail sales. He said that Bajaj sales was akin to institutional sales because everything that was manufactured had already been pre-booked. It was more about people management and sales management. He was recruited by Rahul Bajaj but also spent significant time working with Rajiv Bajaj. I asked him whether he agreed with the Rajiv’s decision to stop making scooters. Maybe not. The scooter market did bounce back after a few years. He feels that a slew of bad scooter launches made Rajiv believe that Bajaj had lost its game in scooters. Having been a customer of their last scooter, the Saffire, I can attest that the product was a lemon.

Mukund ji managed to get his  Nexon EV to climb the kuccha road to the plateau. Agarwal Ji was a passenger in the Nexon, along with a very enthusiastic 80 year old lady, who was the mother of the Vasundhara Abhiyan coordinator.

There was one more family who joined us, but I did not interact too much with them. There was a senior IIMC alum, probably second batch, who I also could not catch up with. Could not catch up with Aakash too. One of the reasons of my reduced social activity was a group of 40 forest officer trainees who were visiting. We got caught in a traffic jam because of their bus at the entrance to 14 trees. The officers were from the states of UP Kerala and Andhra Pradesh. They are all being trained at the forest academy in Sangli. 

I had to take on an unintended role of becoming Raju guide to this group. We had a session with these rangers at the plateau. Tried to impress upon them the importance of involving the community. We talked about the science behind pond digging. The icing on the cake for them was to get to hear Arvind Gupta Ji speak about his work. We had a lovely lunch. But was unhappy to note that chicken was on the menu. I think we should promote sustainable vegan food at 14 Trees. Found out later on, that the caterer had been appointed by the Forest department. We will give strict instructions to serve vegetarian food from now on. We ended the day with a presentation (the PPT did not work though) followed by a question and answer session. 

Pravin ji has decided to change his plantation strategy for government officials. He has run out of space in the current plot. So the tree plantation ceremony became a tree photography ceremony. These trees will be planted in a plot that belongs to the forest department itself. And photographs will be sent across to be the individual trainees. All of the visitors were asked to fill in the Google form. So the data has been captured. They will be now bombarded with emails from now on. Google form is best. You have to scan a barcode and then automatically the form pops up. There were issues of range. So a lot of hotspotting had to be done. Maybe we can have Wifi in the reception area to take care of this. 

Arvind ji’s suggestion to Pravin was to have a core team of volunteers who are paid at least living wages. Arvind ji remembers his own story of Tata Motors. Way back in 1978 he was getting rupees 1200 per month from Tata Motors. When he left to become a volunteer, the NGO made an arrangement for him to stay. Food was taken care of. Yet he was also paid a stipend of Rs. 300 per month, which was enough for survival in those days. His suggestion was that Akash should be paid something similar. And possibly a few more members added to the core team. You cannot run an organisation of this scale with only part time volunteers. Pravin ji to think about it. Arvind ji also talked about writing to Madhav Gadgil about the project. And if it is possible we will get Madhavji to visit the site. I need to follow up with Arvind ji for that.

We need to have a checklist for tour management. I usually make a call for volunteers at the end of the interaction. Totally slipped off my mind this time as we were in a hurry to get back to Pune for my 1800 hrs society meeting. Actually got home at 1900 hrs. The society meeting went off quite well without me. We should have started off at 19:30 hours. And then easily reached home at 2100 hrs.

Discussion with DFO, 5-Jan-22

We were to meet with Mr Ayush Prasad, the Zilla Parishad CEO. but his wife was down with Covid so he had to isolate himself. Then Praveen asked me to come over for a meeting at the District Forest office, across the road in Van Bhavan, near Patrakar Nagar. Along with the DFO, Sunny (Santosh) Sangla, from Chakan Industries Association was present. Aakash joined us later. The DFO briefed us about the 10 year working plan for forest development. The patch is split into what coops. Each coop details out the land which needs to be worked on in a particular year. In Medankarwadi, we are in year 3 currently, so we can start work in coop number 3.

Ideally we need to have a tripartite agreement, which is legally more sound. The three parties being: the forest department, an executing NGO, and a corporate which will fund this project. CSR allocations happen in the month of April. So they need to be approved by March. Usually this is 2% of a company’s revenue. An estimate is made by the government which will be subject to financial audits. This estimate is then forwarded to the state government for approval. 

Companies like Mercedes and Mahindra have approached the Forest department directly and have got into bipartite contracts. This is part of their CSR initiative.  Mahindra has committed to plant 25,000 trees. Mercedes had taken up a 50 acre plantation along with an NGO, Shaswat, which works exclusively with tribals. They picked up a plot in Ambegaon, but they had a bad experience. The neighbouring villagers uprooted a lot of the saplings that were planted. 

Sunny mentioned that there is no garden in Chakan. There is only one school for the underprivileged which has been set up by Mahindra. Water for the Chakan Industrial area comes from Bhama Askhed Dam. They had planned to divert some of this for the Medankarwadi forest. The industries that we can target in the area for CSR funding are: Bosch, Sany, Tetra Pak, Force Motors and Hyundai. Sunny’s family used to run an oil mill in the Chakan area. They’ve been staying there since 1974. They were the first factory to come up in Chakan. They had a brand called Gemini, which has now been sold to Cargill. They also have an interest in garments, and own Jaihind stores. They provided employment to 300 tribals by giving them sewing Machines for making their garments.

We had Chetan who joined us later, from MCCI. Chetan is the MCCI sustainability initiative head. A very theoretical person who has a M.Tech. He talked about carbon sequestration etc. Chetan talked of carbon capture and storage and the target of achieving Net Zero in India by 2070, maybe even 2050. He mentioned the work that Jim Corbett National Park is doing in putting trees in the ownership of villages. Green Indicators are required to be disclosed in corporations to their headquarters. People like to volunteer. 

We had a long chat with Raghunath Naykade, Head Social Forestry for the four districts of Pune, Satara, Kolhapur and Solapur. Raghunath was earlier working with MIDC. He was responsible for setting up 43 effluent treatment plants. Raghunath ji mentioned some GR which has been floated by an officer called Apte, which we could go through. This is a substitute for tripartite agreements. The forest department is paid the money up front by the corporate. Then the forest pays an NGO on a prorata basis, dependent on the completion of the work. A menu card is given to the donors. Raghunath ji is working on such a scheme with NTPCin Solapur. Another one is with HPCL, who have gone in for a Miyawaki forest. Another example of social forestry he gave was a park that has come up in the Warje area. There is a patch for engineers, a patch for doctors etc.

We gave a proposal for 10,000 trees at Medankarwadi. The thumb rule is about Rs. 1500 per tree, so that worked out to about Rs. 1.5 crores. The DFO wanted to have a connection to the number 75, the Azadi Ropya Mahotsav, in the Medankarwadi tree plantation. He talked of 75 different species. The other options are we could look at: 75 acres or 75,000 trees. At Medankarwadi, we should start with lots where the encroachment threat is the highest. We can look at doing a JV with the Social Forestry department, but that seems to be tough as interdepartmental turf wars are afoot. Raghunath ji has promised to introduce us to the senior folks at MIDC who can help with fundraising nudges. Without funding, he compared our work to kirtankaars. Everybody enjoys the music, feels spiritual during the pravachan, but when they go back home nothing changes. 

Notes on the IITK faculty team visit to 14T, 11-12 March 2022

What happens when the average global temperature goes up by 4 degrees Celsius? Most of the current human population geographies become the new Saharas. Large scale migration happens to Russia and Canada, maybe even West Antarctica. 14 Trees, Ecological Society and IITK’s Chandrakanta Kesavan Centre https://www.iitk.ac.in/see/ckcepcs/ had organised an interdisciplinary meet of academicians at Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics to discuss solutions which will allow Indians to stay away from polar migrations. The idea was to bridge disciplines when we look at climate solutions. So what problems were we going to solve? Kiran Deshpande, representing the corporate side, asked the group to Identify 2-3 priority areas which will deliver maximum impact in developing a pathway to a sustainable future. The group decided to focus on: Human greed and climate change. We would look at these primarily from a lens of water and energy. 

Technology and economics work with tunnel visions. Given our educational backgrounds, we believe in solutions that reflect the biases in our upbringing. As an engineer, I focus on technology in solutions to climate change. We need to de-silo the study of the environment. Economics, technology, ecology and humanities need to work together. We need to understand the impact of our actions, for every solution creates other problems. A good solution will try to create minimal side-effects. Alas, holistic solutions are difficult to find! ‘ 

Yet, interconnections are important. One man’s consumption is someone else’s income. In the pandemic as consumption went down, workers suffered. Bejoy Thomas of IISER Pune talked about a water management study that he did in peri-urban Bangalore. If more Bangaloreans start recycling waste water, downstream farmers in Mysore are affected – both in terms of quality and quantity of water. As solar water pumps become more affordable, groundwater levels will drop faster. Every time humanity benefits by the free information flow in a Google Search, you burn the energy equivalent of a cup of coffee. Every extra GB of ‘free’ space on your gmail account means a new energy guzzling memory storage device being set up on a server farm someplace. 

As Kakuli Mukhopadhyay cited, If we go ahead with renewables there will be winner states like – AP, MH, KA and GJ. But there will also be loser states like MP, JH, OD and BR. There is no equilibrium of the past that we can go back to. Our obsession with solutions will lead to winners and losers. Reskilling and employment generation will become important for the losers as sector after sector goes through upheavals which are caused by climate change. 

Mukund Mavalankar, solar expert, felt that greed is the biggest problem. As Kiran Deshpande, trustee at 14T puts it: we need to transform from – What is in it for me? to – what is in it for my grandchildren? to – what is in it for the other non-human species? A culture of giving has to develop. Ajay Phatak, with his dual tech and ecology background, felt that we are not working enough on the demand side. Economics prefers supply side problems as demand side problems are difficult to solve. Like yours truly, Ajay not just preaches but practices his demand side solutions. Both of us are commuting cyclists – and we do our bit for climate change – one pedal at a time. If city traffic planners nudge more people into choosing lighter, slower personal transport vehicles, then we need to worry less about electrifying vehicles, increasing road widths and building flyovers. 

I believe that demand side management is also more sustainable. When you buy a Rs. 3,000 Kurta from Fabindia, most of the money is not going in raw materials. The embedded water and energy are the same in a Fabindia kurta as a Rs. 100 kurta at a roadside shop. One of the solutions to sustainability is to build environmentally responsible brands. Companies can use these surpluses to support rural livelihoods and local ecologies. 

Continuing on the thread of changing behaviour, we need to create a demand for climate change in our kids. Nudge GenNext to change lifestyles to a lower per capita energy consumption. Get kids to accept aka EF Schumacher – ‘Small is beautiful’. Advocate small, appropriate technologies as an alternative to the mainstream ethos of “bigger is better”. There was also a counterview that felt that we need to have scale because we are so damn big. We are getting to 10 b soon.

A lot of us felt that scalability is a bad word. Instead, focus on replicable. We need to consider equity in consumption, inequality and justice. So our solutions should be decentralised, affordable by locals, labour-intensive, energy-efficient, and environmentally sound. Think small – at the smallest scale that is viable. Village level sustainability needs to be explored. 

Then the IITK tech team took over. Ashish Garg and his team from the department of sustainable energy gave us a crasher on energy and conservation. In energy use, we go through the process of generation, conversion, storage, transportation and consumption. With losses at each of the stages. How can we reduce these losses and wastages? Prof Ankush Sharma (http://www.ankushsharma.com/) felt that there is too much reliance on batteries for energy storage. He believes that mechanical storage will work out cheaper than battery storage. 

In solar, thermal is quite under-tapped and there are a lot of applications where heat can be used. In manufacturing, heat is an important ingredient. Most heating in manufacturing is through electricity. In solar the focus at the country level is moving away from research to manufacturing. If we can get silicon manufacturing into India, that would be the killer app. Our current solar tech is at least a decade behind contemporary tech in China. Off grid solar in Maharashtra for agricultural pumps are not as effective as on grid solutions of  Gujarat. Crystalline panels are ok for current solar, but for 500 GW we may need to use silver. 

Hydrogen is very expensive now. Hydrogen through methane is still good – because CO2 is less of an evil than methane. To create green hydrogen, obtained through electrolysis of water, 56 kWh of energy is required to get 1 kg of Hydrogen.  Seems exorbitant use of energy, but then so were batteries and solar panels a few years ago. So we need to invest in hydrogen too. The team also talked about its ambition of making the IITK campus carbon neutral by 2030, albeit by not including the hidden carbon being added in the new buildings that come up on campus.

Gurdas Nulkar, of the Pune International Center, talked about focussing on change that you can make, instead of blaming the West. PIC believes that cities occupy 2% of the land – but generate 70% of emissions (they also account for 70% of the GDP). So we should focus on cities. Pandemic has made some gains – as personal consumption levels dropped. And now, there is a mad rush to get back to normal. PIC has made a policy paper in 2020 for making the Pune Metropolitan region – 7000 sq km of land – carbon neutral by 2030. 

The focus will be on the transport sector, because there are not too many process industries in Pune. There are 17 warehousing hubs in Pune, and logistics between them need to be smoothened. There are 22 rivers in the PMR; most of the land along rivers belongs to the irrigation and tax department, and will be used for plant based carbon sequestration. The east facing Sahyadri slopes also have good forestation. Rooftop agriculture – should be entrepreneur driven. 

40% of energy usage in PMR is coming from electricity. Domestic sector is the biggest consumer. Followed by institutional and then industry. Agriculture is last. PIC talks of the two pronged approach of reducing consumption and increasing efficiency. The Prayas team informed me that the low hanging fruit today is going to be the humble ceiling fan. That is the biggest consumer of energy in PMR. Fans in use today consume as much as 350 W of energy; new BLDC fans use just 10% of that. There is a 17 to 20% T and D loss at MSEDCL, which includes pilferage. Step up transformers can be considered for reducing these T and D losses. These will require gas insulated substations, which have higher capex. PIC plans to start soon with pilot projects which will be funded by the government and corporations. 

We ended with a debate on governance and policies. Our hunger for energy is the root cause for carbonisation. Energy also has a strong relation to food, water and population. Our value metrics should be based on emissions, embedded water and energy, instead of money. Our current metrics value a dead tree more than a living tree. We need to have alternatives to RoI and NPV when it comes to evaluating projects. A high interest rate tends to discount what happens 20 years in the future to a near zero. This needs to change. 

Girish Sohani, the BAIF ex President, talked about bringing in a modification in performance metrics. He quoted ‘The Wellbeing of Nations’ where the authors talk about human wellbeing in conjunction with ecosystem wellbeing. We should not be looking at growth – but well being. For example, the lower the emissions, the better a nation’s health. Living longer, healthier and happier are the new goals. 

So at the end of the first day, did we achieve what we had set out to achieve? My thoughts. It ended up being a sensitisation program for the IITK faculty members. Otherwise, I thought it was mostly economists trying to talk to other economists, ecologists trying to their audience. I was most impressed by IISER’s Bejoy Thomas, the lone social scientist who did his best to inform us about the unintended impact of decisions that city planners and ecologists take. One creature’s shit is another creature’s food. Capitalism, though it has survived, is not perfect. In Kerala, decentralisation has helped development. What I liked about Bejoy was he came from a background of economics – and had migrated to social sciences. I think these kinds of faculty members teach best – because they know how to unlearn.

Can market forces / government / civil society bring about this transition? Markets work on quarterly basis, Governments on 5 year ones – it is civil society which needs to take the long term view. Civil society then needs to nudge governments to take the right path. Biodiversity committees under gram panchayats are mandated by the biodiversity act of 2002, but they don’t exist. We need to nudge governments to act on that. 

There were 4-5 of us who tried to structure the conversations and felt that it would be a good idea to have a consensus on what problems we are trying to solve. Turned out that we all loved our echo chambers – and we continued defining the problem from our personal biases. Listening could have been improved if we had smaller groups – where everyone was given a chance to speak. Spoke to the Prayas team over lunch – and found them to have great insights about energy. Unfortunately, both of them did not speak up at all during the session. Had suggested to Ajay that we do something on group activity – but he felt that changing the structure at the last minute could cause a lot of angst amongst the PPT wielders. Methinks, the next rule of our meetings should be that we should follow the Bezos rule. Ban PPTs. 

About 20 of us landed up at Vetale on day 2. Pravin had arranged for a Tempo Traveller – so I did not get the chance to take the new Tigor EV on a long drive. First 5 hours at Vetale were spent in breakfast, tour and lunch. We sat down under the jackfruit tree for a brainstorming session. Bejoy was quizzed about the social impact of technologies. He has promised to do some thinking and come up with his thoughts on how a higher emphasis on solar power would impact society at large. 

Karishma, from ATREE, talked about how grasslands and soils are great for carbon sequestration. Deep soil areas like hills and water basins should be conserved. She also talked about an integrity carbon ton. What she meant was that we do not just look at carbon sequestration – but how in the process of doing that we have impacted local livelihoods, conserved water and restored ecology. She talked of some international funds which look at metrics like this. We should definitely get in touch with those folks through Karishma.

Another idea that got bounced off was related to our communication with the government and CSR stakeholders. We talk mostly about one metric, which is the number of trees planted. But as Karsihma pointed out, the impact is much more than that. Groundwater levels have gone up. 175 tribals are now meaningfully employed. 65 villagers get contracts for supply of services and equipment. What we need to do is to quantify these in our communication. Both corporates and sarkaari officials love numbers. Let’s give it to ‘em. Bejoy suggested that we should actually develop an index which captures our overall impact and then do a time series study of that index. Some of the IITK faculty members promised to help out on the study front.

Prof Ankush talked about using mechanical energy storage systems at 14T instead of batteries, when we start using solar panels. I suggested an idea of using a portable battery-BLDC motor combo for driving pump sets. (Chheda will donate batteries for this. I think we can also develop an integrated solution for this. Will talk to Joshi at Shirwal for this.) Pravin wanted to know if we can do something about the plastic waste being generated on the villages of Vetale road. I will be talking to Dr. Jayant Gadgil to see if he has something to offer as a solution for this.

There were a lot of suggestions to ramp up our presence on social media. We should ask Kiran to craft a comprehensive outreach strategy for crowdfunding. IISER and IITK have offered to host some 14 T films on their websites. I have promised to get Kamlesh over and get a film done about the project. We already have a great film made which is there on the website- we need to have a shorter version of it which we can share on WhatsApp.  Took me some time to hunt it out from our website. Here it is – https://youtu.be/V-fZmDAyFVs

Btw, when you do a YT search it is almost impossible to find. On the way back, we discussed a startup idea for a motorcycle retrofitting EV kit, which can be incubated at IITK. I hope Prof Ashish Garg can take this idea forward.  

Hi Guys,

Over the last one year, I have been volunteering at Pravin’s social startup, 14 Trees. I spend a day a week converting Pravin’s seed ideas into forests. If you are in Pune and haven’t visited yet, let me know. I will arrange for your visit this weekend. And then, I will let the trees do the talking.   

If you can’t come, read on. This is a call for saplings for our forest. Send across a sapling. You will need to water it for 3 years. You will have to shoo away grazing animals. Can’t find the time to do that? Let me help you reduce your guilt. It takes 3000 bucks to sponsor a tree for life. Ping me an emoji and I will reach out to action your tree! 

Rohit Toshniwal 

Electrical Batch of 1999

 Volunteer Trip Plan

20 volunteers from KPIT are planning a visit to Vetale.Here is a plan for the visit.

Departure will be at 0600 hrs approx via individual cars. We will all meet for tea and light poha breakfast at a restaurant someplace after Chakan around 0700 hrs. We will leave around 0730 hrs and reach Vetale at 0830 hrs.

Individual volunteers will go along with our local workers to different sites. The workers will assign them tree watering work. Around 1100 hrs, we have a ceremony where the volunteers become tree parents themselves. 

We will come back to the reception area around 1200 hrs. Volunteers will share their reflections. There will be an ideation session, where we will debate what needs to be done to get back the forests and the trees. Individual and group action plans will be charted out.

This will be followed by lunch around 1330 hrs. A 14 T senior volunteer will brief the group about the history of the reforestation efforts, as well as the challenges faced as we begin the journey of reclaiming lands for forests. Departure for most of the KPIT volunteer team will leave around 1530 hrs after a chai session. 

We expect 3-5 of the core KPIT volunteer team to stay back for a detailed discussion with the senior volunteer. He/She will take them through available 14T projects which require working on. We expect the core KPIT group to select one of these projects. We will discuss timelines and milestones for the project(s). The Sr volunteer will meet the core group in Pune after a few weeks – and the final review meet will be with Pravin at 14 Trees Vetale site.

Volunteer Zone design

Outreach:

Tree Parents

Partner Corporates

Partner NGOs

Individuals

Corporates

NGOs

Gram Panchayats

Government

Operations:

Water management

Saplings

Tree guards

Ecological surveys

Fire management

Content:

Design and Aesthetics

Website

Social Media

Testimonials

Blogs

Videos

Training:

Volunteer Induction program 

Volunteer mentoring

Employee mentoring

Finance:

Fundraising through CSR budgets

Crowdfunding

Payment mechanisms

14 T Notes, 11-May-22

The Tigor went fully loaded to Vetale. Apart from Sheetal and Meher, Anita M and Hema joined. Was happy to note that even with a full complement of passengers, could get 92 wh per km for the 130 km journey. 46% battery was consumed. 26 * 0.46 = 12 kWh. (with this data, it indicates a wh per km of 91)

What helped was the relatively cool weather in the morning. We started at 0630 hrs – and reached by 0815 hrs. Also the evening breeze was cool. We did not use ACs either way – but I guess the battery cooling requirement also came down. This is the algo for getting more juice out of every kWh for EVs.

Met with a few new, and as always, interesting people. Prasanna runs a company into waste water cleaning using microorganisms. He has done his undergrad in microbiology from Fergusson, followed by a Masters from the UK and a PhD from NTU. Ajay is mentoring Prasanna’s company, Lemnion Green Solutions, https://www.lemnion.com. Both Ajay and Prasanna are Dnyana Prabodhini alums. Did not get to spend too much time with Prasanna. What I gathered was that most of the work is going to be with the government – and that would make the waste water business even dirtier 🙁

There was Hamsa, who works with Pro Earth Eco Systems, www.proearth.in, a company that is into garbage management. A little bit like Swach. What they do differently is plastic segregation into many sub categories. They are working with 200 societies and bungalow owners in Pune. What would be interesting to know is the cost economics of local composting. She has a 3 year old daughter, who is going to be joining, Swadhaa – on Sus road. Hamsa stays in Kothrud – so the young un is going to do a bit of travelling to get there. She could also check out Jigyasa, which is closer. https://peepaltreeschool.org/teacher/octopus-school-jidnyasa/

Aditi runs an interesting company – the doodle factory, http://thedoodlefactory.in. She grew up in Pune. Went to Mumbai’s SNDT to do a diploma in fashion design. Was disillusioned with the non sustainability of having her customers buy new dresses as frequently as possible. Found that she can make an equally good living by sketching. She also trains quite a few students on not just sketching, but a more holistic appreciation of art. She also retails sustainable products. She has an interesting QA test. Every new product goes into her composting pit first to find out how it decomposes. Only then does it hit her store shelves  She has volunteered to be the coordinator of the design team at 14T. Am sure we will all benefit from her aesthetic sense.

Meher is a pass out from IRMA. He has worked with CSR, NGOs and the government. He will join Pravin for a few meetings with sarkaari officials – and hopefully help 14T get registered as an official agency for getting our projects associated with MNREGA schemes. Hopefully, Meher;s understandings of the working of the wheels of the government will help expedite the process – and reduce pressure on our daily workers’ wage bill.

Sheetal comes from a tech background. She has shifted recently from Bangalore to Pune. She is trying to start something in the green space in Pune. Pravin has offered to incubate her venture at 14T. The condition is that she needs to finish a year of volunteering here. Pravin is going to be posting 5-10 projects which are high priority. We would be happy to have Sheetal on board in any of these projects.

And there was Madhuri. She has been doing some good work in rural skill development. She has done work on spoken English. But her current focus is organic farming. She is going to be organising a visit to Bhor this month to visit one such farmer. Would love to join, if she can accommodate.

Hema is a perma-forest enthusiast. She stays in Belmont Park, where my friend Dimple also stays. She was keen to start a project in 14T. Pravin is keen to help her do that. What would help is Hema and her perma-forest team crowdfunding 10-20 acres at Vetale.

Got some good gyan from Pravin about pond building at Shirwal. We need to dig the stream bed till we reach rock. And use the mud for making a dam. The dam needs to be reinforced with stones on the outside. The dam height should be such that even in a flash flood the top should not go underwater. We need to provide an outlet around 4 feet below the top of the dam. It is preferred that the side relief channel should have rock on one side, so that the water continues to flow in the basin.

Pravin will be adding more volunteers to this WhatsApp group – and we will be doing a face to face meeting on the second Saturday of every month. We meet at Ameya on 10-Jun for breakfast. Have offered use of my new office for 14T, which is walking distance from Ameya.

IIT Kanpur Net Zero Meet, Oct 22

The meet at Kanpur, Approach to Net Zero, was a follow up to the Pune meet. We were looking at do-able action points for climate change. Prof Ashish Garg started the day by summarising the discussions that we had at GIPE in March 22. The questions that had cropped up at the Pune meet:

• Can market forces bring about the transition?
• Can govt policy bring about transition?
• Role of civil society in transition?

The inaugural session saw Pravin recounting his entrepreneurial days. And how his company had started a peer learning program called the WiFi Knowledge Summit. What differentiated this program for others was its focus on discussions rather than lectures. The design was that anyone can interrupt anyone. So sessions end up being fun. The summits still continue and are sold out sessions; attendance is restricted by design. Pravin’s hope was that the workshop would turn out to be as interactive as that.

In hindsight, it did not – and I guess that there are design issues. When you design sessions for interaction, you need to have presenters provoking and challenging the audience, rather than bombarding them with giga-tons of information. And the pity was that we had such a lovely diversity of participants; we could have drawn interesting insights from multiple perspectives. The best session in that sense was the concluding session of the 2 day program, where students actually managed to ask questions – and mind you, this was in spite of the moderator, who was in love with his own views. Prof Garg and team need to seriously look at how this change towards interaction can be made in future sessions.

The original plan was to walk from the Visitor’s hostel to the department of industrial management and engineering. But we had to take an electric rickshaw as it was raining. Rain in October is unheard of in Kanpur. We were informed that even Dasshera’s Ravana could not be burned because of the rain. The about to be harvested rice crop of the region is also in trouble because of the unseasonal rains. Another impact of extreme climate events is the 3 – 4 deg C rise in March temperature that caused the wheat yield to come down significantly. This seemed to be a message from the climate gods that the time to wake up has happened.

We had a very interesting discussion over tea where some of us were discussing what would be the life of the homo sapiens species. The hominids are 2 million years old, the homo sapiens much younger. Some of us felt that we guys would last a million years more, but the consensus seemed to be more like 3000 years more to go. And the cause of the self destruction would be a climate which would wipe out our food and energy sources. If we want to get out of the trap of a self fulfilling prophecy, then it’s time to stop discussing, and start doing. It’s not the government’s job, it’s ours. Watch this Steve Mutts’ film about man’s conquest of nature and creation of garbage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfGMYdalClU&t=0s

In 2008, Pravin was reading an in flight magazine which mentioned that from 595 giga tons of emissions in the 1800s, we are at 850 giga tons now. Though Pravin is an IITK Computer science engineer, he could not relate to such numbers. He realised that to convey the climate message, we need to work with smaller numbers, stuff that common people can understand. This led to 14 Trees, which is simply the number of trees a person needs to plant to neutralize her own lung’s CO₂ emissions. Pravin spoke about three pilot projects, which involve not just tech, but also social and economic aspects:

• IIT Kanpur Net Zero
• Pune Metro region Net Zero
• 14 Trees – carbon sink

Abhay Karandikar, the IIT Kanpur Director, talked about the IIT Kanpur Net Zero project. The idea is to create a template that other academic institutions can adopt. The 1100 acres campus has its own peculiar set of challenges in implementing net zero. He then went on to inform the audience that in 2021, the first M.Tech cohort of the Sustainability Energy joined the campus. Plan is to start UG programs soon. And from energy, the idea is to transit to Sustainable engineering in future, by including water etc.

Poonam Mehta was the next speaker. She is joint Commissioner at Pune Divisional Commissioner’s office. She is also a student with Pravin at Ecological Society. She talked of the 3 ecology related schemes that the Pune Division is running:

• Swach Bharat Abhiyan – for solid and liquid waste management
• Majhi Vasundhara Abhiyan – tree plantation, biodiversity and tree census.
• Namami Chandrabhaga – cleaning tributary of Bhima which flows through Pandharpur. The Bhima flows through Pune and Solapur districts.

She talked about implementation measures like competitions amongst local bodies. Panchayats, councils and municipal corporations are put into separate categories. Each body is ranked based on a point system. There are high jump awards for the bodies that show the most improvement on a YoY basis. Good news is that the Pune division has bagged the first prize in the state.

Poonam wanted to get some inputs on waste management technologies. Civic infra lasts for decades, so the government should not bet on the wrong horses. The audience of academicians were waiting to pounce upon the hapless bureaucrat with their recommendations as soon as she finished her presentation. Pravin emphasised on the importance of pilots. The phase of experimentation is missing, and we need to try out alternatives before any government body floats RFPs.

Dr Vinod Tare of Namami Ganga fame, who is a prof at IITK, advocated decentralised water treatment. (PMC and PCMC have mandated STPs as part of all new projects above 100 flats.) Dr Tare also advises that cities have to start with Inter-linkages of city water bodies before they start looking at intrastate river linking and the like.

Prof Rajeev Jindal wanted to know from Poonam what can be done to change people’s anti-social behaviour related to disposing garbage on roads etc.. How do you change that? Anil Shrivastava recommended that we can get some best practices from the city of Indore – the municipal body has changed mindsets of its residents.

Next was Prof Ankush Sharma who talked about IITK’s pilot on rural micro-grids. This was a project funded jointly by the Indian and US governments. IITK engaged administration more than politicians for this project. A smart electricity distribution system was worked on, which took into account renewable generation. This pilot had 5 sites – two urban, two semi-urban and one rural. The rural one, about 40 km from the IIT K campus, was located in village Shivrajpur. In 2018, the IITK team identified two hamlets over there which had no electricity. Unfortunately for IIT, and fortunately for these two hamlets, thanks to the 2019 elections, these hamlets got electricity even before the project started. So the goal was changed to give reliable power supply to these hamlets in contrast to the 7-8 hours that is available in a typical UP village.

These two hamlets had 85 and 75 houses each. One hamlet – Bargadia Purwa – had families that owned cattle – so a 30 kW gobar gas plant was set up to generate electricity and fertiliser. Small solar installations had existed in the hamlets even before the project started, but two 30 kW and 70 kW solar installations were added in the two hamlets. The local utility, which was a partner in the project, helped out by upgrading the transformer from 25 kVA to 69 kVA. And finally, 100 kWH of battery storage was added using a hybrid inverter. 3 solar pumps were installed in each hamlet

The hamlets were connected internally for load balancing. And total demand was limited to 25 kW so that the distribution system is not overloaded. A Microcontroller takes automatic decisions based on demand and supply status. In the daytime, solar is priority. The daytime power is also used for processing agriculture produce. At night time, biomass kicks in. The battery storage system is there as an additional backup at night. Today, there is almost 24 by 7 power supply in these villages. There is a 5 years AMC for all the project equipment – and that has helped get the solar back when there was some vandals who damaged the panels.

The tariff is 3.25 per kWh. (Utility charges are Rs. 3.5). Total spend on the entire project was Rs. 2.5 cr. The costliest equipment was the battery, which is rated for a life of 6000 cycles. Net metering has been installed. There is a village society created for energy bills collection, to make the project self sustainable later on. With reliable energy have more local enterprises come up. Atta chakki and oil expeller being planned in community building that has been put up.

The IITK team has observed that the hamlet’s aspirations have increased since the setting up of this project. Living standards have improved. The fridges and TVs that were part of the dowry have started getting used. Washing machines have started getting purchased. There is a farmer cooperative with organic farming along with marketing outlets in Kanpur. On the flip side there are design issues – like air conditioning required for battery during summer months! Would be interesting to see what happens to the project when the AMC period runs out.

The person with the most practical experience on energy in the room was Vivek Porwal, the energy secretary of MP, who has additional charge of the government corporations that operate the renewable energy sector in MP. Vivek is a 97 pass out of IIT Bombay with 12 years of experience in the energy sector. He talked of something that new energy folks seldom talk about: the cost implications of greening a black grid.

Rewa Solar was the first to come up with huge dollops of government subsidy. Since then the subsidy has been withdrawn, but interest in solar has continued to grow. 10% of MP’s energy is from renewables now. But cost impacts at grid level have now started to appear. There is also an intermittency problem associated with renewable that can affect grid supply. Solars are best in the day time. Wind comes on best in evenings. Hydros are good for peak load use. Thermals are difficult to shut down and restart. If you operate them at part loads then cost per unit goes up. At night, you can get energy only from thermal and nuclear.

Green hydrogen is an option for night time use too, you generate during the day, and put back into the grid at night. But to generate, you need solar during the day. Or if you want green hydrogen, the energy for electrolysis has to come from some place – maybe thermal, how green is that? In such a scenario at a system level per unit cost will come to Rs. 10 per unit. After taking into account transmission and distribution losses, it will become Rs. 15 for the consumer. Will the Indian customer be ready to buy at that price?

Generating solar energy is often viewed as connecting a solar panel inverted output to a bus bar. But there’s a lot more to it than that. A grid has to balance supply and demand in real time. So there is a need to create responsive storages for peak loads. To take care of these fluctuations storage needs to be built into the grid. Batteries which can respond for shorter durations and plants which can be bought in for longer durations. Storage costs are high. As things stand today, it is not batteries, but pump storages that are most economical. The tariff increase due to capex cost is Rs. 5 per kWh for pumps and can go up to Rs. 9 per kWh for battery storage.

Without storage, to get to a 50% renewables target, Rs. 77,000 cr required for power generation capex in MP alone, and this does not include investment in storage. This kind of equipment will see a fixed cost increase of Rs. 2 per unit. The overall variable cost for the grid may also go up with the addition of solar, as smaller capacity peak load plants will need to be added. Batteries are expensive today for storage. Worldwide battery storage is 1% of grid storage – in the best case scenario, Vivek feels it would go to 3%.

So, is distributed generation the future? Today load and generation are both predictable.  In future, both are going to be unpredictable. So grid has to be smart and adapt. Scheduling is usually done in advance – earlier one day – now real time. Peak loads can no longer be the basis for capacity planning. We will have no choice, but to look at nuclear for peak loads. Government has started changing its perspective towards nuclear. The future of nuclear could even be small units of modular design, run by private sector players.

Nitin Pandit spoke next. Nitin has been working in the energy and environment since 1979. He finished his engineering from BITS Pilani and immediately jumped into the environment space. He stays 6 months in Ratnagiri – and 6 months in Washington DC. Specialises in working on demand side management.

Energy per capita will continue to grow – maybe 3 to 5 fold over the years. There is consensus by all governments on that. Electricity consumption for poor has to go up. 7-8% growth for next 50 years. One big cost for the electricity sector is interest, accounting for 17% of total costs of the sector. We could look at some financial modelling which could reduce this cost. Losses are at 10-11% for a grid, so would it be better to inject solar at consumer level? Farmers pay much lesser than other consumers – and the T and D losses are also the highest for the farm sector. So even if we can look at micro-grid solars supplying to rural India, we could be better off at a system level.

For demand management, we cannot look at the poor, who are already at just survival levels of energy usage. There have been hopes on trickle down for jobs and prosperity for the poor thanks to the consumption of the rich. But most of these hopes are misplaced. It is only by targeting the discretionary consumption of the rich that demand side management can be done. Can we reallocate energy from where it is a luxury to places where it is a need?

Entertainment, convenience and comfort – these are the biggest uses of energy by the affluent class today. Another thing that we need to keep in mind, it is the members of the affluent class who are the decision makers. 1% of India earn 22% of national income. The ratio of energy usage for rich to poor is 1000:1 in urban India and 100: 1 in rural India. Can we expect the affluent class to have a policy which is against their consumption ethos? De-growth in energy usage for the elite is a fait accompli. We have to look at redistributive pricing to get the rich to pay more.

Another idea to manage demand side is to look at a better match between energy generation and usage. Simple energy math tells us that every conversion of energy is associated with losses. If we are able to use solar based heating for a process that involves drying, then we are better off than using solar to generate electricity and then use that to operate electrical heaters. Or using the extra heat in running biogas fired generators for vegetable drying.

Next, we moved on to a talk by a young energetic Anant Chaturvedi, who runs Vikalp – an NGO that works on creating technology for Bharat, not India. Anant’s goals is to make Bharat’s small farmers reduce their dependence on inorganic chemicals and fossil fuels. The word Vikalpa means alternatives. So what alternatives is Anant offering to our farmer friends?

He started with paddy irrigation, which is conventionally done by flooding the plot, most of the times using diesel pumps. For the past few years, government has been subsidising the purchase of solar pumps. His crib is that a solar pump is used for irrigation for 100 days a year and then lie idle for 265 days. His suggestion is that why marry the panels to the pump? We can use that energy to power other devices.

Coming back to solar pumps, the main issue with solar pumps is that the flow rate is much lesser than diesel. What takes 8 hours for a diesel pump takes 18 hours for solar, so the farmer has to use additional pumping during the season. He does that by taking an engine on rent. Anant has designed a sprinkler for use with solar. His solar system has no battery, and only works when there is sunlight. With increased efficiency of reach, irrigation now happens in only 3 hours instead of 8 hours. Sprinklers were earlier thought to be a rich man’s farm. Conventional sprinklers were considered heavy cap-ex. Marginal farmers require sprinklers which can be shifted around. So Anant has used a 32 mm pipe of 100 m length for portable sprinkling. A conventional sprinkler requires 50 risers per acre. Anant’s in contrast uses only 10 nozzles – so discharge rate required is less. 

Anant also has an option of running this system on bullock power. The pump can draw water from a depth of 60 to 70 ft. Anant has also made tractor attachments that can be drawn by bullocks. He provides native seed banks. When I visited the Vikalpa store in Kanpur, I also found Vikalpa branded water filters that use sand, gravel and a little bit of copper to deliver clean potable water, without any use of electric energy. (I thought at Rs. 8,000 they were kind of unaffordable to the farmer, but I am told that there are cheaper models in the works.)

A pain area for harvesting is labour. With sickles, it takes about 14-17 people working the whole day to harvest one acre . The labour cost is in the range of Rs 3500 to 5500 per acre. Petrol operated portable harvesters are available, but they require about Rs. 600 to Rs. 700 per day of fuel. The Vikalpa electric Scythe offers an alternative to petrol cutters. It is a Rs. 30 K magic wand that you use in fields for doing harvest with labour that is not so back bending. The scythe weighs just 2.5 kg with battery and motor, so it is easy to handle. Labour cost comes down to Rs. 1000 per acre with the Scythe. It is totally made in India, except for the special steel blades – which are imported from Italy. Kanpur Nagar nigam have started using these machines for park maintenance.

Vikalpa also works with farmers to promote organic farming using gaumutra. They buy organic products from these farms and retail them online as well as in store. Nitin Pandit recounted an interesting story of his Aitree days on the subject of organic farming. Organic was not economical, primarily because of the labour cost of manual deweeding. Aitree botanists who visited the farms found 43 varieties of edible ‘weeds’ growing in the farm. Lunch served at Aitree to visitors is now made of these weeds!

I visited the Vikalpa store in Civil Lines, Kanpur. Found a lot of stuff retailing in plastic – but was happy to note that they did have some grains in mud containers too. Was also happy to see neem leaves being used as a natural insecticide to prevent insect infestation. Took home 0.5 kg of kala namak rice – which Anant insisted I should try. My suggestion to Anant was that they need to also have an organic food kitchen in the restaurant – where folks can come and do some basic cooking and enjoy their meals.

So is Vikalpa creating templates for sustainable villages? Will the Indian model be different from the Israel one? There were sceptics in the audience, who pointed out to similar experiments in the past. These seemed to be promising at the start, but as things scaled up, administrative costs increased inertia and killed the experiment. There was also a disconnect about how Vikalpa can be both aspirational yet traditional. We have 4 cr draught cattle today, so bullock drawn pumps make a lot of sense. But bullock pumps have been developed decades ago, and the reason they will find it difficult to scale up is the fact that maintaining animals is expensive now. Farm yields for organic farming were discussed – and the consensus was that we need more data to validate the economics of organic vs conventional.

The next speaker was Pradip Swarnarkar, who is faculty at the Humanities and Social sciences department of IITK.  He talked of the linkage between energy source change and employment, Especially the informal workforce of the mono-industry coal districts of Eastern india. About 20 lakh people are employed in the Informal economy associated with coal. How will these districts be affected once we move away from coal?

The PM has declared that 50% of energy requirement will be met by renewable in 2030. And by 2070, when we plan to go net zero, 100% of our energy has to come from renewable. We are concerned as a country about energy security: availability and affordability – both are important. In 2022, we will mine 600 million tons of coal. By 2025, it is slated to go up to 1000 million tons of coal. Will we be doing energy justice when we move away from coal?

Pradip talked about a live case study of the temporary shutdown of Margehita coal fields in Dibrugarh district of Assam. In most coal mining regions, if one coal block shuts down – another one opens up close by. But this was a case where the entire mining block remained shut for 3 years. The study aimed to track what happened to the mine labor during those years? If you are in the formal employment of Coal indial Ltd, (and there are 250,000 such folks), you need not worry. CIL will pay you salary irrespective of whether your mine is operational or not.

But if you work in the much bigger informal sector, then you need to find your own way around. So you migrate. When Pradip’s team did a house to house survey, they found that most of the labour had found jobs by migrating, most to Southern and Western India. Some reverse migration happened when the mines reopened. Fun fact 1: the conventional energy sector is centered in the East, but the new renewable energy finds most of its supply closer to the major demand centers in Western India. Fun Fact 2: In Goa, when iron ore mines closed, migration did not happen. If you are already in the prosperous West, there is no other place that you can head to.

5 central trade unions associated with different political parties in India. Has done good work for contractual workers too. Here unions work with other unions, unlike political parties. They have created joint action committees. Most infra in coal districts is developed by coal companies: health, education etc. Sports, water, roads, staff quarters etc. The Unions ensure that these facilities continue. The demand is also for CIL CSR to fund skill training programs and local job creation.

Reskilling is difficult for the informal economy participants. In Jharkhand, coal guys will work 2 hours at night – get a cycle load of coal and sell it in the market. How can we reskill them? Germany’s Ruhr valley took 50 years for the labor transition to happen. Justice delayed is justice denied. Can we reduce this timeframe? Should we go bottom up instead of top down to design this transition? West Virginia and Cosatto are a few examples of successful rejuvenation, what lessons can be drawn from these places for the coal districts of India?

CIL and NTPC believe that coal will stay for next 30 years. This is what is making these old energy sector players complacent. This transition will take time. The companies should realise that diversification away from coal is the only way they can survive. Some ideas were discussed like repurposing of thermal plants. Thermal plants are equipped with land, railway lines, grid connections and water. So these may be used for generation of green hydrogen. Better than setting up Greenfield projects, where land acquisition itself can take years, if not decades. In the Eastern region, Singrauli district itself generates 30,000 MW of power, with 4 NTPC power stations and 3 private ones. Maybe even more workers could be required for manufacturing of green hydrogen than those required currently to run the coal based plants.

The next speaker from the social sciences space was Prof Bejoy Thomas of IISER, Pune. He talked about Mike Hulme’s ideas drawn from his excellent book – ‘Why We Disagree About Climate Change’. Here is a Wikipedia excerpt – The author looks at the differing views from various disciplines, including natural science, economics, ethics, social psychology and politics, to try to explain why people disagree about climate change. The book argues that climate change, rather than being a problem to be solved, is an idea which reveals different individual and collective beliefs, values and attitudes about ways of living in the world.

Bejoy believes that a solution obsession can result in tunnel vision. The impact will then tend to be looked at in terms of losers and winners. He illustrated the environment development tradeoffs using a 2013 study that his team had done on the drying water bodies in North Bangalore. Before Bangalore moved to Cauvery, this was the watershed that used to supply water to Bangalore city. Today there are more borewells than working ones in this region. The culprits – eucalyptus trees and intensive vegetable cultivation in that area. Eucalyptus is a crop of pure economics – as labour became more costly, land owners found better returns by just planting fast growing eucalyptus, and didn’t bother about its water sucking nature. Vegetable farming picked up as Bangalore developed. Vegetables tend to be grown closer to cities – as freshness is important – and the transport costs to the ready market tend to be much lower.

Both these saw a move from erstwhile rain-fed farming to borewell agriculture. There were a few folks who tried drip agriculture when water quantum started reducing. But economics favoured deeper borewells over drip irrigation. In the early days of drip irrigation, there were also a lot of problems reported of nozzles clogging. 95% of ground water is used for irrigation – a possible correlation between low electricity price for farm sector and the insouciance over extra energy costs associated with deeper borewells.

The next speaker was Ajay Phatak, trustee of Ecological Society, Pune. He is an alumnus of IIT Bombay and has been in the ecology space for more than a decade. Ajay is on the board of a few start-ups in the healthcare and ecology space. Ecology to Ajay is not just trees, but ecosystems of all types – riverine, wetlands, deserts – restoration of these ecosystems is one area which has not received much public attention. Ajay talked of how there is a large skew between energy usage of the rich and the poor? Can we close this gap to reduce our per capita energy bills down? Also he feels that agriculture is the largest emitter of carbon. We need to do some serious thinking for this sector.

Ajay Phatak then threw some random action points for Net Zero. Electricity and heat generate about 1200 million t per year of greenhouse gases. Of this agriculture alone contributes to 700 million t. So we cannot do much, without including agriculture in our solution space. 55% of our population is engaged in agriculture, and rain fed agriculture is going to be impacted most by climate change. Diversity is better as resilience is more important during climate change. We need to relook resource intensive agricultural practices. As we dig deeper, we are removing carbon sequestered there. More fertiliser means more water. We have to reduce fertiliser use, but to be pragmatic, we cannot go totally organic. Witness the problems faced by Sri Lanka, when they tried to save forex by switching their country to ‘organic’ overnight.

He then talked about a very interesting concept in economics, the Jevons paradox. This occurs when technology increases the efficiency with which a resource is used but the falling cost of use increases its demand, negating reductions in resource use. In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal use led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries. He argued that, contrary to common intuition, technological progress could not be relied upon to reduce fuel consumption. Ajay recommends that we first work on a mindset of reducing usage before we work on improving efficiency through tech solutions.

To illustrate this philosophy, let’s start with food. Underpriced energy has meant falling food prices and an increase in waste. In the US, 40% of cooked food is wasted. So along with food, all that energy used to cook, pack and transport the food is also going down the drain. In India, most of the wastage in food is in storage. Instead of prioritising research on low water using crops and poultry with higher feed conversion ratio, we should see what can be done to change the mindset of the Indian people to go back to vegetarianism.

We need to work on creating more green jobs. What is a green job? One that gets the average per capita usage of energy down. One area for green jobs is for government to let private sector get into taking over work that the government has not been able do too well – restoring our ecosystems. We need to add 11% new forests in a decade. There are 2000 natural wetlands and 65,000 manmade ones, primarily the backwaters of dams, which need to be restored. Nitin Pandit informed us that 13 million hectares in peninsular India can be restored, of which 10 m is degraded agricultural land, 1 million is riparian and 2 million is barren mountain tops like the ones we find dominating the Pune region. There are huge opportunities in scaling this greening.

Ajay’s session was followed by Srikrishna Karkare. Sri has been working on CSR initiatives in 14 Tree’s Vetale neighbourhood – Kadus village. Sri, an IIT Bombay alumnus, spent his formative years at Thermax. He quit in 1988 to start a small trading concern for the chemical and allied industry. His wife, who was at Praj, quit a few years later, when the trading concern decided to integrate backward into manufacturing, based on repeated requests from customers. https://www.enproindustries.in/ has grown today to a 250,000 sq ft factory set in 13 acres of land at Merkel, Pune. Their bread and butter product is lubrication systems for centrifugal compressors and turbines used in the oil and gas sector. They also have a wide range of skid mounted modular heat exchangers, filtration units and chemical injection units. Off late, the company has diversified into pressure vessels and brewery equipment.  70% of the production is exported to over 80 countries.

Sri talked about the 50,000 sq ft corporate office that was built a few years ago in MIDC Pimpri. Designed by Landmark architects, it is a LEED platinum rated green building with 100% fresh air circulation and a 1.5 MW rooftop solar. 80% of energy needs of the Merkel factory are met using solar – and 60% energy needs of office are met by solar. Sri’s son Anuj, also an alumnus of IIT Bombay, used his education in his energy engineering program to design a brilliant building. The building uses maximum diffused daylight to reduce lighting load. But it also blocks direct sunlight to manage heat loads.

There is a two stage evaporative cooling (aka desert coolers) with 100% fresh air intake. This further reduces energy consumption by 60% compared to conventional air conditioning. There is a very innovative earth tunnel heat exchanger which uses pipes dug 12 ft into the ground to exchange to pump the building heat into the ground. This operates with a very low power consumption compared to ACs. This earth air heat exchanger was the research topic of a young IIT D alumnus, for his PhD thesis at TERI. Temperature is kept at 26 C with very comfortable 30% relative humidity. (Just to contrast, humidity levels are 100% for desert coolers.) The feeling inside is akin to sitting under a neem tree on a hot afternoon.

What sets aside Sri from a lot of other green entrepreneurs is his personal commitment to the environment. Both Sri and Anuj cycle down from their house in Pradhikaran to the Pimpri office everyday. Following the example of the leadership, there are 50 more people of the Pimpri team that also cycle to work. As a small token of gratitude, these folks are given free meal coupons, a kind of fuel allowance for their cycles if you please. For folks who get EVs to work, there is free charging available. The office is almost paperless as of today – and by 2024, the plan is for it to be netzero.

The thread on buildings continued in the talk by Swapnil Joshi of Infosys, Pune. Swapnil and team are involved in greening the buildings at Infy. The IT behemoth employs 3 lakh employees. Infy budgets about 100 sq ft of space per employee, so that is about 3 million sq ft of office space, split into buildings with a median size of 0.5 million sq ft. But then there are bigger cubicles foe seniors, conference rooms, corridor areas etc – so the actual built up area at Infy campuses is 51 million sq ft . The Pune development center houses around 60,000 employees. (WFH means that as of 2022, only about 5% of these guys and gals are attending office. Unlike other companies that hire office space, Infy owns the spaces. So they can’t really give up too much.)

Infy’s growth plan, like most of its service focussed peers, has been a linear relationship between employee numbers and revenues. Its journey towards sustainability started in 2008 when the company decided that it would move towards net zero by 2020, paying attention to energy, water and waste. One of the first things that the team did win 2008 was to put energy meters across campus – data was important. Air conditioning is the biggest energy consumer of energy in an Infy building. Most cooling systems work on convection, but Infy decided to add radiation to its arsenal in its fight with heat.

To understand heat loads we need to attend the difference between two heat types. Latent heat causes a change in the state of a substance without a change in its temperature. Sensible heat causes a change in the temperature of substance without a change in its state. Infy uses radiant cooling for removing sensible heat. Aluminium finned panels are suspended from the ceiling and cooled water flows through these panels. The caveat is that the temperature of the room has to be maintained very close to the dew point. Now that sensible heat has been removed, what remains is only latent heat, for which conventional ACs are used with low temperature chillers. With this measure, a 50% reduction in AC load has been achieved.

2020 zero carbon target was achieved. 60 MW of solar panels have been installed. On a per capita basis, there has been a 55% energy and water consumption from 2008 to 2020. Energy usage has gone down from 110 to 67 kw per sq m per year for Infy buildings. On a cycling trip to Hinjewadi, I remember a particularly notorious egg shaped building, that seemed to be designed more for architects to win awards a the IT engineers are boiled in the egg. Good news is that 12 years in to a building’s life, there is a retrofit. So there has been a facade retrofit in this building – and life is cooler inside now. And the norm now is that only 30% of a building’s vertical area is dedicated to windows. Another energy saving practice is to run the building without AC on weekends, when the attendance is much lower.

Gurudas Nulkar was the last speaker of day 1. He talked of his learnings in developing a zero carbon plan for Pune Metropolitan region.

• Water, Energy and food are interconnected – don’t look at them separately
• Trend lines are more important than absolute numbers
• Benchmark with the best practices of the private sector. Like gas insulated substations to reduce stepdown losses as used in Infy campus.
• Involvement of stake holders is important – data sharing happens when stake holders talk to each other.
• Don’t worry too much about data from agencies. There are easier ways to get data – Petrol / Diesel dealer agencies were much better than IOC. Got data from toll booths to identify logistics hubs

Pravin concluded the day’s proceedings with a list of possible action points for IITK.

• One green building at IIT Kanpur. (Am impressed by that – maybe I need to look at how we can green all our school buildings too.)
• Placement linkages to start-ups in sustainability space
• Create a Google Doc – where people post a problem – and industry / faculty agree to mentor. Students who are interested take up that problem – and is part of their thesis. Ratnagiri pilot done by Nitin Pandit – 10 colleges – 40 students have take up and are ready to start soon. Green buildings could be a great area – interdisciplinary tech – good for students
• Elective course – sustainability, ecology et al at IITK – taught by visiting scholars
• Next meeting at IIT Gandhinagar – will invite NID and IIM Ahmedabad to that meeting. Governance is missing – we can take help of IIMA – to validate green points are not green washing.

Here is a brief background of some of the participants who did not speak, but added a lot of value by their questions:

Sudhakar Keshavan – sponsor of center was here. 1976 batch of IIT Kanpur. Then did his MBA from IIM Ahmedabad. Is based out of Washington DC. ICF CEO for 20 years. He is also an investor and on the board of a number of start-ups, including the Cadmus group. He has donated a handsome sum to start the Chandrakanta Kesavan Center for sustainability at IITK. He wants it to grow into a climate school. The center celebrated its first anniversary in October – and the event was to commemorate that. Sudhakar and his family had come down to participate.

Anand Rao – Prof at SITARA – alternative tech for rural area. IIT Bombay. Was a pity that we did not get too hear too much from him. They are doing some interesting work in the intersection of science and culture.

Rajeev Jindal – Is a 98 PhD from IIT Delhi. Has worked 20 years in industry before getting into academia. He was one of the key members of the organisation committee for the workshop.

Anil Srivastava – ex IAS. He has been a member of the Niti Aayog, where he was working mostly in the EV area. He is on the board of a few charging station providers startups. He is also visiting faculty at IIT Kanpur

Vaibhav Choudhury – Spent 15 years at GDI partners. Is co founder of clean air startup. Was with U Chicago Economics department.

Mausami – is faculty at IITK. Her interest areas are green hydrogen and green steel.

IITK Academic Symposium on Energy Policy, 12-Oct-22

There was an academic symposium on day 2, which I also partly attended. This was a much bigger event – in an auditorium next to the Visitor’s hostel. Smaller rooms create a bigger impact when it comes to information exchange. So I did not enjoy the day as much as day 1.

Navroz Dubash, Professor at the Centre for Policy Research, spoke about India’s climate change approach. The pace of global emissions has been growing. In the last decade alone we have emitted 1/3^rd of total CO2 emissions starting from the pre-industrial era. Though India is just 4% of global emissions, our contribution in this share is increasing. The social costs of mining, air pollution caused by coal and oil burning and mining have started to hit us now. India needs non coal options.

Some insights into the relation between GDP and energy, excerpted from a 2019 McKinsey article:

In 1800, the fuel of choice was biomass, such as wood from fallen trees. Even during the latter half of the 19th century, after the United States and parts of Europe had begun to industrialize, many economies ran primarily on biomass. Biomass was highly inefficient as fuel, as almost all of its embodied energy was lost in its burning. Still, before widespread industrialization, the conversion loss was bearable; generally, there was enough wood to burn to make economies grow. 

The 20th century’s embrace of petroleum (to accompany coal) sent production and consumption into overdrive. Fossil fuels lose about 40 to 70 percent of their embodied energy when converted into electrical or mechanical energy—a lot, but not when compared with the near-total loss incurred by burning wood.

The decoupling of the rates of economic growth (climbing steadily) and energy demand growth (ascending, but less steeply) will largely be a function of the following forces:

• a steep decline in energy intensity of GDP, primarily the consequence of a continuing shift from industrial to service economies in fast-growing countries such as India and China
• a marked increase in energy efficiency, the result of technological improvements and behavioral changes
• the rise of electrification, in itself a more efficient way to meet energy needs in many applications

Solar is good because the cost of generation is below the average tariff. So we have seen a lowering in the price of energy in the last decade – as solar and wind energy have kicked in. So what are the challenges as we move away from coal? 3% of the revenues of the union government come from taxes and royalties on coal. 44% of railway revenues comes from coal. So it’s not going to be easy for the government to let go of coal. The mindset of the policy makers in governments all across the country is that coal is here to stay for a long time. They have also looked at the response of Germany in the recent Ukraine crisis and have realised the challenges of shuttering up plants without having reliable options in place.

Another challenge is the way our tariffs are designed. We subsidise residential and agricultural customers by overcharging industrial and commercial. Today large customers continue to stay on the grid because of the flexibility and reliability the grid offers. But if energy storage costs drop significantly, and large industrial customers start going off grid on solar, this cross subsidy will be impacted.

Nitin Pandit talked of the role that the grid is going to play in future. Today, energy generation is central and so supply is key. Grids are rewarded by the amount of energy that they sell. There is no incentive to reduce this sale of energy. If we look at the West, there was resistance by the grid operators to introduce energy efficient devices like CFLs and LEDs. Why would utilities promote devices that reduced their energy sales? The next challenge that grids are facing, and they again have negative incentives to deal with it. A distributed generation system means a loss to grid revenues. Will this mean a move away from monopolistic distribution designs to smaller or competing grids? Dispersed energy generation can happen through small wind turbines, rooftop solar etc. Dispersed energy storage can happen through small pumped storage projects and batteries. We can even explore new aspects of storage through flywheels and compressed air storage.

Nitin talked of energy efficiency based on energy usage. If what we need is cooling, then there are other less energy intensive ways of achieving it – say green roofs. If what we need is crop irrigation, then installing more pumps, even if they are solar powered, is not the only solution. Good plumbers can save energy. Bad installations of pumps consume huge excess energy. We can look at tech that reduces water usage – say drip irrigation. In the construction sector, we can look at saving not just energy, but also water, by adopting techniques like dry construction. Dry construction is actually an ancient science – for example, buildings like Greece’s Parthenon have been constructed without the use of mortar. Use of wood and steel in building frames can also lead to savings of energy on construction sites. Though a lot more energy goes into manufacture of steel, when you look at recycling the building after its life gets over, steel may actually make more sense.

The next speaker was Prof Anup Singh, who is associated with the Industrial and Management Engineering Department at IIT Kanpur. He also heads the Center for Energy Regulation and the energy analytics lab. As of 2022, India has a total power generation capacity of 400 GW. 210 GW is coal. 163 GW is renewable, which includes 47 GW hydroelectric and 116 GW of solar and wind. 25 GW is gas. Nuclear is 7 GW. The good news is that the grid’s energy generation is going up, but emissions are going down. This is thanks to the change in generation mix being more skewed towards renewables.

It is expected that no more thermal generation capacity will get added after 2022. But what happens if we start decommissioning thermal plants? Our storage costs would balloon. So if we do have to invest in new coal power plants the moot question is: will investors take the gamble on coal being economically viable for the next 30 years? Will green hydrogen take over? At the current high costs, green hydrogen can only be looked at as an export commodity.

Can we look at a grid redesign that will increase the system level efficiency? The agriculture sector is not profitable for any grid. Utilities may be interested in getting agri off grid so that their margins improve. Dispersed solutions like solar will help. This move will also make industrial and commercial customers happy, as cross subsidies may reduce. But agri is used to free power, so they may resist?

Can going off grid be economically justified? You could have some dissatisfied customers going off grid. Some households in Puducherry have gone off grid – but they are rich folks. But a lot of users will want to retain their grid connections, using it for energy storage with net metering. You will need to budget for 72 hours of backup for bad days, when you don’t have sun. This is relevant for remote locations like Andaman and Ladakh, where integration with a larger grid is a challenge. The good news is that wind is generally strong in monsoon months, so having wind capacity in place can offset days of bad solar.

Dr Raj Shekhar, Municipal Commissioner of Kanpur, was the next speaker. His key concern areas for Kanpur city are:

• Keeping the Ganga clean and abundant – 38 km of Ganga flows through Kanpur district
• Growing vehicular traffic
• Growing trend of solid waste
• Depleting forest cover in Kanpur Rural

When he looks at the PM’s commitment to Net Zero by 2070 made in the PM’s address in Glasgow, the key issue is development and lifestyle Vs environment. As an administrator, the implementation issues are going to be –

• Alternative technologies
• Legal backing
• Awareness

The next speaker was Prof Sachchidanand Tripathi of the Department of Civil Engineering at IITK. He spoke of the clean air program of GoI to reduce Particulate Matter 2.5 by 40% by 2026. 2 million deaths were reported because of this black evil. In addition to PM levels, what also needs to be looked at is the oxidative potential of the particles; the higher the oxidative potential, the larger is the damage to lungs. Prof Tripathi spoke of the data gathering required to check implementation efforts. There are 700 air quality monitors, both auto and manual. Each monitor costs about Rs. 1.5 cr. To keep tabs on 2026 emissions, 4000 more monitors are required. They are currently being imported. The good news is that IITK has developed low cost sensors and mobile based machine learning models. These will reduce data acquisition costs drastically. The sensors need to be replaced in one year, but the sensor itself costs a few thousand rupees.

Prof Tripathi’s session was followed by a speaker from aamchi Pune, Amitabh Sinha, the resident editor of Indian Express, Pune. He started his career with PTI, before moving on to Reuters and then the BBC. He has been with the Indian Express since 2007. He started by giving us a background on inter governmental negotiations on tackling climate change.

Global emissions have increased by 50% since 1990 and average temperatures have risen by 1.1 C over pre industrial times. Island republics have started looking for places to migrate. To meet 1.5 deg C, global emissions have to peak by 2025. The Kyoto Protocol was the first agreement which lasted from 1997 to 2005. It was replaced by the Paris Agreement which was in effect from 2015 to 2020. Why did Kyoto need to be replaced so soon? What was lacking? Kyoto, rightfully in those times, focussed on develope countries. Emission reduction was seen as the primary responsibility of these 37 ‘developed’ countries. Specific emission reduction targets and time frames were assigned to each of these countries with nominal penal provisions for the inability to achieve these targets.

The problems with Kyoto:

• Was against prevailing the power balance, and it made powerful nations look guilty in the eyes of the rest of the world.
• It excluded emerging economies like China and India from bearing the burden of climate change remedial measures.

So in 2015 came the Paris agreement, which was:

• Lacking in ambition
• No one responsible, because everyone responsible
• The lowest common denominator was applied: As a country, you only had to do what you could do.

What does the Paris report card look like? Europe seems to have achieved its target, US has seen no change in emissions, China has actually increased emissions more than 3 times, Indian and Brazil emissions have increased 2 times.

The next speaker was Vaibhav Chaturvedi from the Delhi based Council for Energy, Environment and Water. He stressed on the importance of having a clearly defined long term energy policy. Power sector investments have a life of 30-40 years, so investors need clarity. So the policy clarity and credibility for the 2070 net zero emission goal is important. Peaking and net zero have to go together for the economy. Incidentally, it will take 30 years after peak to get to net zero. With the increasing electrification of the transport sector, net zero actually entails higher electricity generation.

Possibly nuclear will play a very important role – and the chances are we will see an increase in nuclear energy generation from the minuscule 9 GW today to 200 GW in the next few decades. Land constraint and public concerns for nuclear will need to be addressed before we start our nuclear journey. Indigenous nuclear reactors are an imperative for India. Nuclear generation may not have too much of private sector participation coming in to start with. To start with, it will be the PSUs like GAIL,ONGC, NTPC who may get a foot into the nuclear door, thanks to liability clauses not applying to them. But In the long term private players will troop in. At Rs. 5.5 per unit for nuclear energy, grid stability will be viable when we move to 70% of generation being renewable – and coal not being an option.

Power pricing reform will be required. Industrial sector pricing will need to be changed. Only 20% of energy needs of industry are met by electricity. If it has to increase, then industrial power tariffs will need to go south. We need to also look at Too Big To Fail entities like Coal India, ONGC and GAIL will need to find alternate revenue streams. Can they lead to a shift in geopolitics? Can India replace Middle East oil and export hydrogen to countries like Japan? For the hydrogen economy, a framework is important. Adani and Ambani have started investing, which is a good sign

The next speaker was Alexander from the International Solar Alliance. ISA was conceived as a joint effort by India and France to mobilize efforts against climate change through deployment of solar energy solutions. It was conceptualized on the sidelines of Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change held in Paris in 2015. Alexander is a Canadian engineer from Waterloo. He worked with electrical utilities in Canada before shifting base to India. He went on to do his MBA from ISB and has been working with ISA since then.

Wind and solar are complementary – in monsoon wind is highest, solar is lowest. Alexander took an example of November, the worst month for renewable. In the worst day in November, based on current generation and demand data, you will have a problem. But Alexander’s point is sacrificing a few hundred hours of reduced power availability in a year is a compromise that the world has to make. Solar generation is an ideal power generation for managing peak loads, use in charging batteries for transportation sector and improving the efficiency in buildings.

Demand is growing faster today than renewable energy (RE) is being deployed. The main issue with RE is its intermittency – hence its coupling with storage is key. But what needs to be looked at is aligning demand with generation. The goal is to provide power as and when needed, not a flat profile. Today we talk of high storage costs associated with 6-12 hours of energy demand being taken care of by storage. But if we were to change the demand curve to make it 2 – 6 hours then we can see a fall in stored energy price to as low as Rs. 3.5 per kWh. By 2050, it is expected that storage costs would have fallen significantly.

If you want to use coal to meet peak, you are overbuilding capacity. Coal has benefitted immensely from power purchase arrangements, which entail fixed costs irrespective of how much power you draw. Storage could be the way ahead if you want the primary generation to be solar. A faster (5-minute versus 1-hour intervals) dispatch frequency has the advantage of a shorter forecast time horizon, so that imbalances can be corrected more often through dispatch instead of through limited automatic generation control resources. This has the effect of reducing both the imbalance and the system operating costs.

Cost of ramping up a coal plant is quite high compared to batteries. Storage is more responsive. But we need to look at storing energy in formats which aid the consumption. De carbonisation is expensive for marine / aviation / industrial heat. For instance, if your main load is cooling, then we can freeze ice during the day and then use it for cooling at night.

Real cost of coal power inflexibility is borne by farmers facing power cuts. Most of India has spent huge money to buy voltage regulators, which are required because the grid cannot match demand and supply, leading to voltage and frequency fluctuations. Alex made a passing reference to synthetic inertia in solar. Was intrigued – and did some research. Here are excerpts from https://www.current-news.co.uk/blogs/synthetic-inertia-and-its-role-in-improving-grid-stability

Discussion of high penetration of solar and wind energy inevitably leads to the question: “but what about inertia?” To understand why many believe inertia is a critical function of conventional generation, one must first understand inertia’s role in the grid.

A consequence of Newton’s First Law of Motion, inertia is the resistance of an object to a change in its motion. In the electric grid, the motion in question is the rotating mass of a generator spinning at a rate synchronized with the system frequency. Inertia is stored rotating energy in the system.

During a system disturbance, generation and demand become unbalanced, resulting in a change of system frequency. Stored kinetic energy in those rotating generators is then released, slowing the drop in frequency to allow other generators time to restore balance.

Solar generation has no rotating mass; instead, photons collide with atoms and knock electrons loose, generating a flow of electricity that is converted to grid power via inverters. As there is no synchronous rotating mass, this is called asynchronous generation. Some believe that a predominance of asynchronous generators will lead to more pronounced system frequency drops and diminished system reliability due to the absence of inertia.

Enter “synthetic inertia”: inverter-based resources like solar and storage react so fast, they can mimic rotating mass inertia. Where inertia is similar to pumping the brakes on a moving freight train, synthetic inertia works by instantaneously increasing output to counter frequency drops via swift control of power electronics.

We ended with an open house. And of all the questions that got asked, most of us will remember one asked by a young student in the audience: Can we have a Kyoto kind of protocol that applies to wealthier states or regions inside India? Nitin Pandit felt that we must. Some of our bureaucrat friends pointed out that this can be a good bargaining tool, but will be difficult to implement. We ended the day knowing that there is still a lot that needs to be done to make our ecosystem and communities more resilient. We have not even thought about warming caused by cattle based methane.

Discussion with Pravin Bhagwat, 14-Dec

What is going to be the long term model that will govern 14T’s operation? 9 years. 180 acres. A committed team of volunteers. At Vetale, we are in the process of hitting our first two milestones: self sufficiency in food and energy. We are getting there. But the honest answer is still – ‘We don’t know.’ But here is stuff that we do know:

• Command and control solutions don’t work
• Natural resources based revenue generation won’t work
• Produce centric models won’t work
• Piecemeal solutions don’t work
• Point solutions to point problems don’t work
• Quick Fix solutions don’t work
• Social media hype won’t work
• Second hand learning won’t work
• Running before crawling won’t work

Possibly some learnings can be drawn from Auroville minus the spirituality. What is needed is a higher level of values than produce alone. What we are selling is a kind of crypto, but much better, because we have real world tangible assets – trees – to back what we are selling. What we are nurturing, apart from the trees, is a set of businesses focussed on sustainability. Who we hope will end up through profit and equity sharing – in making the 14T experiment sustainable. 

Though all our well wishers are folks who value sustainable living, we can categorise them into two broad buckets.  One, people who help fund our trees and tree caregivers. Two, people who can pitch in with an even bigger donation – their time. These are people who will run experiments, start projects, and act as mentors to our sustainability focussed startup ecosystem. 

To all people who want to advise us for the journey, a simple message – first practice, then preach. Make the beginning by joining us for a half day trip to Vetale. Experience the work that we have done. Have simple village food with us. The journey begins with filling in the google form for a visit: Here’s the link – (hunted for it – it is not there on the website – Pravin please add here)

14 Trees Proposal for Energy Self Sufficiency

14 Trees is an experiment involving common people in reversing climate change. The idea is to reclaim barren land for forestation. The project started 9 years ago with 4 acres of land at Vetale – and has grown today to more than 1200 acres across multiple sites. We work with native species, both botanical and human, to achieve this transformation. We have 100+ folks from the local hamlets of the Thakkar community who are employed at the project site. Some of them are being groomed to become vendors to 14 Trees. 

All of this has been done without employing a single person in ‘management’. We are lucky to have a small army  of volunteers who have worked to make this happen. We can proudly say that every Rupee of funds that we have raised has been used to buy land, plant trees and water them. 

The Vetale project is the sandbox which helps make templates for our other sites. Today, Vetale has achieved self-sufficiency in water. The 85,000 trees on this 200 acre campus have been grown solely by using rainwater harvesting. There are 75 ponds that have been dug to achieve this self sufficiency. We are on our way to achieve self sufficiency in food for the folks who work on our tree plantation and watering projects. 

Our target for 2023 is self sufficiency in energy. We believe that India’s future lies in distributed energy generation and storage. Today we are using fossil fuels and electricity derived out of fossil fuels, to run our pumps and tree guard manufacturing workshops. We want to generate energy at the Vetale site, using a combination of solar, wind and biomass. We are seeking funds to run two experiments:

• Developing a portable LFP battery-BLDC pump package, which can replace our petrol operated pump sets.
• A 10 kW solar panel which will be housed above a pond and will directly power a submersible pump. The excess energy will be used to develop a gravity storage project in a dry well that we have. This gravity storage will supply the night time energy needs for the two buildings on our campus.   

We believe that our learnings from these projects will help create the templates for modular generation and pumping solutions. This will be an alternative to the centralised approach of refinery based green hydrogen production and mammoth 1 GW solar farms. Any IP created by these projects will be copy-left, in the sense that it will be available for free use by the community, on the condition that users of this tech will allow their own innovations built on top of this tech, to be used without any charges to community users. 

We seek about Rs. 50 lakh of funding for these two pilot projects. We will be seeking this in two tranches. In the first phase, we will be requiring Rs. 25 lakh for initiating work on the solar-gravity storage project and two solar pumps with six 48 V 30 Ah (1.5 kWh) battery packs. The balance Rs. 25 lakh will be required 6 months after the disbursement of the first tranche – and will be used to double the size of the pilot.

For any clarifications on the above, please feel free to reach out to us.

Thanks and Regards,

Team 14 Trees

14 Trees Notes, 14-Feb

Cycled down to Pravin’s house. Sanjeev also landed up there and we left for Vetale in Pravin’s car. We discussed broad areas to cluster volunteering:

• Individual donors engagement
• CSR donors engagement
• Volunteer motivation 

We thought that Anita Marathe, Mukund Muley and Sanjeev Nayak would be the appropriate people to act as lead coordinators for the above three areas. 

Pravin mentioned that he had two projects which he identified as high priority ones: Recruiting an Executive assistant to help handle his routine tasks. Creating a tree map at the Vetale site. Atul Gopal was entrusted with doing spadework for these projects. 

We talked to Anant to get a tree map experiment started. Got Gulab and Kalpesh to accompany us to plot no. 775, which is the family grove area. We have Rohit Toshniwal’s trees planted there. The idea was to look at triangulation and get data which will help us map out the plot. I assumed that there would be lots of readymade software to convert this distance data to maps – but have not been able to locate any so far. We split the plot into clusters. We started by drawing an overall layout of the plot to identify the clusters. We then moved to individual clusters. The algo is to identify broad rows and start by measuring distance between trees along the rows. Side by side, we also measured distances from trees of the previously mapped rows so that we could construct triangles as we went along. Going along rows helps as it reduces climbing up and down the hillside. We could map about 100 trees in 2 hours. 

Giri’s rotary team landed up at 1245 hrs at the site – and we accompanied them to the Rotary plot for some tree plantation. 14 Trees now has its own pickup, which helped move the Rotary team around. Don’t think we will get too many volunteers from the team – but definitely a lot of donors. Giri has promised to get some more Rotarians to Vetale – and guide them through the work that we are doing. Was quite happy to see a lovely meeting area that has been constructed next to Pravin’s office cum dining area. We sat there for some time – and took feedback from the group. They had some interesting suggestions about using Rotary for FCRA funding – which Pravin was not enthused about. The suggestion he liked was doing some joint work for CSR projects. 

We stayed back for a few more hours after the Rotary team left. Ideas related to offering internships were bounced around. I also felt that we need to get a structured mentoring program started in our volunteer group, which would involve senior volunteers acting as coaches for the junior ones. My suggestion was that volunteers should meet once a month to review 14T projects that they are doing.  Have promised to attend the monthly meet of volunteers. Also, volunteer for a day instead of a few hours – and ensure that some part of that day is spent either at Vetale or our IISER office.

14 T Notes, 25-Feb-23

Picked up Bhanu from NCL society at Panchvati at 0715 hrs. We then drove down via University and Mula Road to Vishrantwadi. Nayana joined us from there. Nayana Sahu stays in Viman Nagar. She got referred to 14 T by Rima Sahu, her sister. Rima works at Sahyadri school. Nayana has done her education in travel and tourism. She worked with companies like British Airways in the area of ticket pricing and route planning. She is currently working on a project to document Odisha’s real history. She is also a qualified psychologist – and she works mostly with children. Her observation is that it is most times parents who need counselling and not children. She is interested in volunteering. Have proposed to her that she can get involved in coordinating with our CSR corporates. Maybe a meeting with Pravin at IISER may help. Should invite her for the volunteer bi-monthly meet.

We reached around 0930 hrs, as the diversion through Alandi was longer by 10 km. After breakfast we started work. Anant suggested that we could map the mango grove just outside the gate. We started by taking aerial shots with the camera pointed straight down. The drone refused to fly above 15 m – the software probably hunts for some explicit permissions to go higher. Because of this, we had to ditch my original plan of taking a high res photo of the entire plot. We could get photos of size 20 ft by 50 ft. This was enough to get two rows oh trees in the picture. We took a series of photos of a single line, but had issues with arranging the photos to avoid tree overlap. At 15 m height, some of the younger saplings were not very visible. Our next experiment was to take a video of an entire line if trees and then convert that video to photos, using appropriately timed screenshots. Got one tree to overlap between two photos, and we numbered the photos 1.1 to 1.6. Photos pasted below:

We then took printouts of the photos. Unfortunately the tree numbers of that particular plot were not available. So we marked the trees with simple numbers. The black and white printout quality was not too great – we could only see smudges in place of trees. But we still finished the exercise and annotated 30+ trees on the plot.

Post lunch, Bhanu played around with his recently acquired drone software and used the waypoint mode to plot the boundary. He then made the drone run multiple paths to photograph the entire line, with auto photo capture every 3 m. The drone set the camera angles based on its own intelligence. This turned out to be a big drain on the battery – and the exercise could only be done half way. But the photos were amazing. Pasted below:

We decided to leave after this, as it was already 1645 hrs. Enroute, Bhanu had a look at the pictures – and we realised that the shots with the camera at a 30 degree angle were much better than the ones shot straight down. The angled photos helped give perspective to the plot. We then took a call that we would take multiple photos around individual plot boundaries and use these photos in Google Earth referencing. A donor would get an idea of the surroundings in which her tree had been planted. Individual tree photos are in any case available on the dashboard. 

Spoke with Pravin later at night. We agreed that we would mark out clusters of 10-15 trees inside the plot and enumerate the IDs of the trees inside the clusters. This way, if a visitor actually wants to go back and see where her tree is, she can be taken to the cluster – and locating an individual tree inside a group of 15 is not a very big challenge. We will do this for the Visitor Plot in our next trip. I plan to come in the last week of March. 

Spoke with Anant. He has promised to introduce me to the guy who digs our ponds. Need to get a couple done at Shirwal in April. The budget is about Rs 3 lakh per pond. PTP trust will be sponsoring the digging. Another area of discussion was recruitment. Have asked Anant to identify 3-4 potential Executive Assistant candidates for Praveen. One had dropped in recently – she has done her MSW and is working with an NGO,  She expects a salary of 20 K. We have offered her 14 K. Will meet her in my March trip – when I will be staying overnight. Hopefully Bhanu will also join me on that trip.

Met with Umesh Dixit at EV office. His office closes at 1630 hrs – so that folks don’t have to worry about traffic. Discussed the tree map data with him. He had an interesting suggestion to make – using the chain link method. In this two lines are marked out as X and Y axes at the corner. And the shortest distances are measured from each tree to these axes. This will directly yield coordinates. Seemed to be an interesting method as it would give us data which we could very easily transfer to Google Earth. The challenge would be to get the measurements done for larger plot sizes. We would require longer tape lengths. Also as the trees grow taller it would become difficult to get the tapes going in straight lines to the axes.

Umesh and yours truly felt that drone mapping will be the cheapest and fastest way of getting the mapping done.I got in touch with Bhanu Mulay and we are going to the Vetale site on Tue, 21-Feb to do this mapping exercise. Pravin will be around then – and can help set the right direction for this exercise. I am optimistic that we can map the entire 200 acre plot on the same day. We will need to check image resolution. Also we will need to have clear identification of plots in the photos. The best thing would be to have a large high res photo of a site. And mark out individual tree numbers on the single image. This would ensure zero duplication. Also the landmarks like big boulders, ridges and ponds could be used as a double check during the tree annotation exercise. 

14 T pitch brainstorming, 5-Apr-23

What a lot of people find very difficult to digest is:

• No RoI in the project
• Relying only on in-bound calls. Staying away from social media to promote the work
• No selling. No Buying. No commerce approach. 

Here are suggestions that Atul and Nitin made to Pravin:

• Pitch. The pitch is for people who have visited the site. The pitch could happen either at Vetale – or when folks return back. Today we seem to be preaching only to the converted. The idea is to ensure that there is a connect with the masses. Where required we try to get the orientation of their moral compasses in the direction of 14T.
  • Different pitches for different age groups
  • The pitch should showcase areas where we can show direct connects to the tree: Water, Nursery, Tree guards, Compost.
  • Emphasise the 14T culture of experimentation.
  • Talk about ambition and scale
  • Talk about the urgency of action
  • Talk about it is not governments but individuals who make a difference

• How do we want people to react? Make the second visit to Vetale, but before that do one of the three:
• Incubate a green business at 14T
• Volunteer their time (Starting with one day a year.) Volunteers need to get an understanding of what work fits and what doesn’t.
• Sponsor trees (Starting with one at Rs. 1500)

• Experience management:
  • Start by making the visitor spend an hour in a location which is typical of the barren land we get when we start work. The idea of Banjar Se Jungle has to be experienced.
  • Spend at least half the post lunch discussion time on Questions and Answers
  • Make art and music an integral part of the aesthetic experience for the visitor. Nitin had started Kalangan at Ratnagiri with a similar objective. We should showcase local talent. 

• Scaling up 
  • Provide a turnkey solution which can be executed by our micro-entrepreneurs. 14 T will get some tree donations in exchange for the work that we do for folks who want our help in replicating Vetale in their land. Thumb rule – 10% of the project cost gets rolled back to the foundation as tree donations.
  • Design a one year training program for the local entrepreneur/ manager. This will take the student through all parts of managing the site: labour, water, managing society, managing donors. Nitin talked about his attempt to hire two people and invest in a full time one year Mali training for the two. One left for Mumbai. The other drives a rickshaw. Entrepreneurship cannot be drilled in.

A 100 acre forest – Proposal for CSR, Jul 23

When you go on a train journey, most of the time the scenery that rolls past you is that of khets and khaliyans. Indeed, 65% of India’s land is agricultural, This percentage is amongst the highest in the world. But about half of this land is agricultural, only in name. Indian laws mandate that if a land has a title of private ownership, it is deemed to be agricultural. Banjar zameen, barren agricultural land, accounts for 32% of the Indian land mass!

We don’t need to look too far for Banjar Zameen in Maharashtra. The Sahyadris are amongst the most denuded hills in the world. The hills of the Sahyadris are mostly privately owned, and hence agricultural. The major economic activity in the Sahyadris is pasturing. The Sahyadris are home to a large cattle population. In the earlier days there would be norms for rotational use of pasture land, so the land would get time to recover. But with increased demand for milk, the pressure is to produce more. So all land is being used, all the time. 

But our problems are not limited just to milk. The real root cause for climate change is our energy intensive lifestyle. Our planet today is suffering from the same problem as its people did during Covid. The planetary lungs are choked. The most VFM oxygen producing facility is the tree. 14Trees’ mission: Reforest India. 

Two years ago, 33 cr trees were planted by government agencies. The 130 cr (aka Indian population) question: How many survived? 14 Tree’s survival rates are almost 100%. One of the key reasons: every tree has an identity. A human’s name gets attached to it the day it’s planted. Once people have their ‘named trees’ standing on the land, social pressure will automatically build for keeping the asset protected forever. Conservation is possible when people start ‘caring’ for what we want to protect. 

To spread the reforesting movement, demo plots are important. The presence of a mini forest nudges the neighbouring barren land owners as well the local volunteers who want to get involved in tree plantation. Our project involves buying denuded land and transforming it to forest. In 2012, we started looking out for land to pilot this mission. After searching for a year, we came across a site near Vetale, about 29 km from Pune’s largest industrial belt of Chakan. We started with 4 acres. The forest has grown to 200 acres today. Seeing is believing – and this is one of the reasons the movement has spread to 60+ surrounding gram panchayats. 

Most plantations by our local forest departments are designed keeping goats in mind. Forest babudom seem to have resigned themselves to the fact that animals will continue to pasture in forests – so babus only plant stuff that animals hate. So you have entire forests of gliricidia and subabul. This is the deceit that the human eye does not catch so easily. These trees are imports – and invasive. They do not support any local fauna. Like humans, trees flourish under conditions of diversity. At 14 Trees, agriculture is not monoculture. 70 varieties of trees were planted, all local to the Sahyadri region. Help from the Ecological Society of India was taken to identify local species. 

If we do a cost analysis of any reforestation project, we find that the biggest contributors to cost are water and labour. In today’s condition, the water table cannot support forestation activity. The 50 years experience of even the local senior citizens was that water cannot be stored at Vetale. There was a generational memory loss of folks who had never seen forests in the area. Most Vetale farmers bring piped water from the neighbouring dam. 14T does not take dam water. If they do that, the Vetale experiment will not be replicable. So the reliance has to be on rainfed ponds. Reducing rainwater runoff, also has the added advantage of top soil retention.

Like every hill slope, Vetale had streams flowing through, which would dry up as soon as the monsoons got over. Wells and borewells dug on the lands are bone dry. One of the civil engineering problems in forestation is creating water bodies to sustain the young trees in the harsh summer months. After purchasing the land in 2014, the first 4 years were spent in building check dams and ponds. Some of the bunds would keep the water, some would lose it pretty fast. The ones that lose water fast have cracks in the ground rock that transfer the surface water to underground aquifers. 

One pond costs about Rs. 3.5 lakh today. The size is about 30 by 30 by 30 ft – more like a well. No cement is used to line the pond, keeping the environment as close to nature as possible. Not every pond stores water. Good spots for ponds are depressions and natural water streams. Percolation ponds next to the water streams are good even for storage, as they will not get broken up by water flow or silted in by the mud that gets carried in water streams. The mystery about how many turn out to be percolation ponds or storage ponds is solved at the end of a monsoon. 

Future wars are going to be fought over water – and 14 T is showing that this battle is not a zero sum game. Vetale wells have seen an increase in groundwater – so this has meant better agricultural yields. 14 T at an individual level does not generate any positive RoI commercially, but looking at the community as a whole – the frugal investments yield handsome returns.

Forestation is a problem of human management. The crib of the agricultural poor is ‘We don’t have food to eat, leave us alone to take care of our own survival. Grazing, burning are all part of the survival game for the rural poor. These are problems that need to be solved. There are adivasi bastis not very far from the farm – and today about 100 people from neighbouring hamlets are employed as daily wage workers at 14 trees. We pay Rs. 500 per day, which is more than what NREGA schemes offer. The one thing that we have not been able to do manually is the ditch digging. Most of the rock is volcanic – and he has had to blast and use JCBs for creating his ponds. But the rest of the work is non-automated by design. 

Projects at 14 Trees are managed by volunteers. Thanks to a dedicated team of a few dozen volunteers, our current administrative costs are close to zero. All the money that comes in goes into trees. Not into salaries of managers and Google Ad word campaigns. And this team of volunteers is experimenting with tech to see how it can solve problems in forestation. Every tree that is planted can be accessed by the donor, thanks to an IT platform created by volunteers from tech companies that support us. Another volunteer team is working at making Vetale energy independent.

In July 2021, some Indian Forest Service officers spent a day with us. Their visit was to learn about how private initiatives can complement government work. They were impressed by how 14T has been able to involve the locals in the project. And how they have been able to build emotional bridges with the stakeholders. For officers who are used to top down planning, this experiment from the bottom up was something to cheer about. There were a few small kaizens that impressed the IFS team. Things like having donor tags on trees to humanize them. Things like attendance and work allocation by photographs. The last word was by Jaykumaran, a young officer from Rameshwaram, Tamil Nadu. In Jayraman’s filmy style, he contrasted the arranged marriage that most officers of his cadre have with forests vs the love marriage that has happened at 14Trees. 

14T Volunteer Meet, 27-Jul-23

Action Points

Switch to paper based feedback. We can use the same wooden square backing boards for visitors to write. We can provide paper and pen to all visitors.

Use buddy system for all volunteering activities.

Nirmala to assign duties instead of waiting for responses from volunteer group

Dashboard utility to be studied – and decision to be made on further development effort for the same.

Design and print tree gift cards of Rs. 1500 and lower denominations.

Have a hall or space where products made by the 14 T micro-entrepreneurs can be displayed

Seed micro entrepreneurs in the area of millets and bio-enzymes. 

Present for the meeting: Sanjeev, Nirmala, Manjushree, Manjiri offline. And Anita, Ajay and Virashree online. Nirmala was briefing folks about tour conduction. One of the issues that troubles us is the visitor feedback mechanism. We have a Google Form built for this – but not too many people end up doing that. Though there have been attempts to get them to fill it during their visit itself, patchy phone signals imply poor connectivity. Feedback also indicates interest of the visitor in growing forests. Here is email Feedback of KPIT Visitors of a 8-Jul tour conducted by Pravin and Atul:

Rohan Pundalik: I would like to share my experience that we (KPIT) had visited today. I enjoyed a lot here, and I plant a tree ( तोरण). I this is my 3rd time to plant a tree. I see that there are a lot of plant here and you are giving your efforts and experience to save the soil and trees. So, its really good. I learned the things that, If you save your future then we should save our earth also. And I don’t have the suggestions yet. But, in future if I have any, I’ll send to you. And the Volunteering I have not yet fixed. But, I’ll really like to come here again.

Nilanjan Manna: I Learn about how little action can create a big change in environment, how natural water reservoir is created in hill area where water level is very low for grow trees, how new trees are planted in hill area to create a forest. we can motivate others to Join this activity for benifit environment.

Sai Madhavi: learn today we have to spent sometime to plant tree also I motivated to loving nature. I also observed one thing that you people are doing Great job for society also it’s good for state,country. I want to be part of this project  as volunteer but Will thinking about it and will you know.

We looked at three alternatives for feedback:

• Provide a Wifi signal in the dining area – this could even be a hotspot from a Vetale based 14T team member.
• Use Email or WhatsApp instead of Google forms. Whenever the person gets in signal range, we will get feedback without worrying about the current status of the signal. One advantage of using WA is that the phone number need not be asked for in the visitor information form. 
• Switch to paper based feedback. We can use the same wooden square backing boards for visitors to write. We can provide paper and pen to all visitors.

The consensus was on the last option. Sanjeev has promised to supply us with one side used paper for this. We can also look at wooden or bamboo based pens which we can make inhouse for visitor use for feedback. As of now, we have left it to the tour guide about what would be the stimuli for providing feedback. Personally, I ask them to share their thoughts on what they liked during this visit and in case they are interested in volunteering, what area would they like to contribute their time in. 

Next was a discussion on the mechanism of conducting the visit. Manjiri suggested that new volunteer guides would be more comfortable if an experienced one accompanies them during the first few visits. Manjushree seconded that idea – and suggested that it should be a permanent arrangement – tour guides should always go as pairs. In the army, they call this the buddy system. All present were in favour of this – and it was decided that from now on, tour guides will hunt in pairs. General Nirmala will direct her troops to field trips, instead of waiting for ‘Aye Ayes’ from our volunteer army.

We have been investing a lot of effort in developing our dashboard. But we are not sure of its utility. Out of the 6 people attending, only 2 – Sanjeev and Manjushree – had actually seen the trees that they planted on the dashboard. Rest 4, including Nirmala and Atul, had yet to have a dashboard darshan. Nirmala to study the stickiness of the dashboard – and we need to take a call about whether this project needs to be continued at all. (I can already see Praveen losing his remaining hair when he reads this.)

After this, the group discussion moved towards fundraising. We are currently raising funds by retail donations for individual trees, Bhoodan, CSR and founder’s contributions. Although we are involved in a lot of activities in the ecology space, Sanjeev observed that the 14 T brand is built around trees – and we should not dilute it during our fundraise exercises. Everynone present agreed with Sanjeev’s PoV. This meant that we should not adopt measures like fund a day’s salary for one of our workers etc.

We have a huge unsold inventory of trees – mostly on government lands. CSR funders are not too keen to deal with those trees. Nirmala’s suggestion was that we have lower denomination gift cards, which allow these trees to be gifted. 14T needs to design great looking gift cards, preferably with a recent picture of the gifted tree and a Google Maps location of the tree. These gift cards can be sold in denominations of 1500, 750, 500 and 250. These will represent 1 tree, half tree, one third tree and one sixth tree. Sanjeev was troubled with the admin expenses involved in getting a Rs 250 donation. But others pointed out that we should take into consideration the lifetime value of a donor. A Rs. 250 donation made as a kid could spur the same donor to larger sums later on in her life.    

Anita suggested that we should be more proactive in encouraging sales of 14T micro-entrepreneur products. This could be through having volunteers take people through a hall where their products are displayed. We could have an honour system where Google Pay cards of the micro-entrepreneurs are on display – and prices are mentioned in the display area. Visitors could pick whatever they want – and make appropriate payments without either the tour guide or 14T team member being involved. This can be finetuned based on experience with visitors. Another measure could be for linkages with institutions who would like to purchase products. CSR donee companies can be encouraged to pick up our products for use in their offices and canteens. Anita suggested that we seed micro entrepreneurs in the area of millets and bio-enzymes. 

We were in agreement with Pravin’s philosophy of not charging for food or 14T grown veggies and fruits. However Atul felt that the experience management for a visitor can be improved. We definitely need visitors’ hands to be used on things other than a feedback form. We need to involve visitors in digging, and watering, not just planting. Also, our micro-entrepreneurs can involve them in the making of some of their work. I would love to teach visitors how to make bio enzymes. I have stopped using soap for the last 15 years – and only use enzymes. Here is a blog on bio-enzymes that I wrote 5 years ago: https://peepaltreeschool.org/waste-busters-priti-rao/

Here are some Pune based folks who work in the same space as we do: 

https://www.farmersforforests.org/

14 Trees Visit, 11-Aug-23

Have been suggesting that Nirmala should be more specific in the ask from volunteers. I get a feeling that the net vector effect of our collective volunteering is not getting us in the direction that we want to be in. Could be also because of the over-democratisation of our group. We need a benevolent dictator (sounds like an oxymoron), who can give us some sense of direction. In my opinion, Nirmala is the best person for that role. Loved it when she called on Thursday and commanded that I be there on tour guide duty on Friday. Was not too difficult to drag myself out of the two meetings that were scheduled. So cycled down on Friday morning to Pravin’s house and the three of us left at 0645 hrs for Vetale.

The main organiser of the program was Mukund Muley. Mukund has been doing amazing work for 14 T. Wonder why he is not on the 14 T volunteer group. He is my senior from COEP – and like Praveen – has seen considerable success in his entrepreneurial journey. Quoting a few lines from his linkedin profile – In the process of motivating the people around him, Mukund used to ask himself questions. What motivates him? His answer was “Problems”. Mukund is an established leader of the Indian system integration industry in the industrial automation domain. 

Mukund is an active member of the Rotary club of Nigdi. His wife, who had come along for the trip, has also shown interest in getting involved in 14 T volunteering. We must invite her to spend a day a week with us at our IISER office. The Rotarians landed up around 0930 hrs. The Nigdi club has good CSR connects with a lot of companies from the Chakan industrial belt. The club had facilitated a CSR initiative from https://www.oerlikon.com/balzers/in/en/ Oerlikon was, in my mind, associated with welding, thanks to the old JV they had in Advani Oerlikon – since named to Ador. Turned out that they are a company that specialises in surface coatings – mostly for the cutting tool industry. They have a factory in Bhosari and 7 more spread across the country. They use vapour deposition for their coatings which requires special equipment as it has to be done in vacuum. 

There were about 40 people who were going to be coming in from Oerlikon for the tree plantation drive. This was going to be on a farmer’s plot – not too far from the hilltop Thakkar vasti at Vetale. With the 20 odd people from Rotary, the total visitor count exceeded 60, which was a kind of record for the 14 T team. We staggered departures so that lunch and breakfast could also be staggered, to make life easy for our hospitality team. The Rotarians arrived earlier – and so the staggering was automatic. By the time we finished a quick round of introductions with the Rotarians over breakfast, the Oerlikon team arrived. As the Oerlikon sat down for breakfast, General Nirmala instructed that I do tour guide duty for the Rotary group. One assumption that we made was validated soon – we did not expect too much of mixing between groups. The unfortunate side-effect was my GK on surface coating continues to be zero, I would have loved to learn more about that industry if I had interacted with the Oerlikon team.

We had mulled over the idea of having a longer interaction over breakfast as a means of identifying potential volunteers and donors in the larger group. Praveen had a 10 min chat about the history of 14 T and painted the bigger picture of the reforestation canvas to the group. We then did the documentation of the visitor-saplings mapping. After this, there was a short walk around the three water bodies in the visitor receiving area – and then started our trek. Was surprised to find all the Rotary members joining the trek – refusing the offer of a tractor ride. There were at least three 70 year olds in the group. We took our first break midway to the site, near a pond. I briefed them about the work that goes into water management. Anil Kulkarni, Mukund’s  mama, was the only person who came along with me to look at the overflow channel that we design in our ponds. 

We reached the plantation area after an hour. The rain gods did not shower us with too much affection on the trek. The initial plan was to have a gyan session in the round hut, but thanks to the enthusiasm of young Gyaneshwar, our local guide, we skipped that and were back in the visitor area at 1245 hrs. Lunch was still some time away, so the Rotarians decided to conduct their formal meeting right away. As a part of the meet, I got to deliver a talk on 14 T. Turned that into a Q and A session. With the Rotarian fetish for time management, only 3 questions got asked. Two were related to scaling up. And one, by Anil Kulkarni, was about the area that can be reforested in a budget of Rs. 40-50 lakh. Anant was there in the meeting, and we did the simple math of 45,00,000 / 1500 = 3,000 trees. At 300 trees per acre, we got a figure of 10 acres. Nirmala tells me that using a thumb rule of 5 lakh per acres is easier. Anil seemed to be satisfied by the size and has promised to coordinate with Mukund and Rotary to take this idea forward. 

After the Rotary meeting finished, I experimented with paper and pen feedback. We used A6 sized papers for feedback – and Anant had some stock of pens which came out to be useful. We could collect 15 forms, which have been handed over to Nirmala. I was quite happy with this low-tech approach of getting feedback. Of the 15 forms received, we could make out that 10 folks had very low interest levels in our project. My suggestion would be to not even worry about entering them into the dashboard. I have offered to do data entry of the 5, if Nirmala wants me to. Tragedy was that by the time the Oerlikon team came back, they were too hungry to participate in any gyan session – and as a result no feedback got taken from them. Would be happy if Sanjeev takes over implementation of the new paper based feedback system. Sanjeev has promised to donate one side used papers. Some more pens will be needed – we can look at getting our workshop to make bamboo pens. I would suggest that we get covers of some old notebooks to be used as writing pads.

After the visitors had left, we had an interesting Nagpur based couple who dropped in: Shripad and Dhanashree. They were visiting their son, who studies in grade 12 at Sahyadri school. Shripad is a food technologist, who runs a company that makes plant based insecticides. They also have an 8 acre experimental farm near the Nagpur super thermal power plant. Shripad gifted Pravin a book on water management, that he has helped translate from Hindi to Marathi. We had some preliminary exploration on starting a 14 T project in the Nagpur area. I will visit with him on my next trip to Nagpur. They are less than a km away from our Bulls Eye Nagpur center.

We started back for Pune around 1730 hrs. Picked up a cheque en route from our pond contractor. (Had overpaid him for our Shirwal pond work.) Discussion turned to what motivates our volunteers to spend so much time with us. I think each of us is on a journey of self discovery – and 14 T helps us in that effort. Nirmala’s current curiosity is centered around what are the non-monetary motivations that work for volunteers. My personal belief is that face to face meetings over breakfast are the greatest motivation for me. And to end the note, would like to invite Mukund and all the volunteers in this group for a breakfast meet at Up South on Nagras road, near D mart, on Thursday, 17-Aug, 0745 hrs. Single item agenda would be identifying projects that can help us with fundraising. And specific asks and timelines from our supermen and superwomen in the volunteer team. I had offered to host lunch in the last volunteer meet, and had reneged on the promise. This time the breakfast is on me. Pravin and Nirmala have promised to attend – hope that all of you also make it.     

Note: Views expressed on this blog are personal.

14 Trees Volunteer Meet, 17-Aug-2023

After a lot of back and forth we finally decided to meet at IMDR Canteen. The good news is that the canteen has passed the Onion Uttapam test that Pravin uses to gauge food quality. So we can look forward to more volunteer meets at this venue. We had Giri who cycled down to meet with us. This was Giri’s first meet with the 14 trees team outside of Vetale – and the good news is that he has joined our WA group. We hope to have him as a regular in future meets. 

I always find new snippets about our volunteer group during our meets. Was nice to know about the sustainable home that Ajay and Shilpa Laddha are building at Bhor. Looks like a good venue for a future volunteer meet – would love to cycle down there for sure.

Was good to have Shalvi Pawar join us. Her presence reduced the average age of participants by 2 years. We definitely need younger chlorophyll at 14 Trees. She has promised to devote 5 hours a week to 14 T work. As a collective, we should help her in her aim to build a career in sustainability. Alas, given the unpaid status of all volunteers at 14 T, we cannot look at getting her to put in more hours.

We discussed the idea of involving more volunteers in fundraising. A simple straw poll hit the point hard – volunteers would only like to work in areas that they like working in. And fundraising is not everyone’s cup of tea. So Gen. Nirmala will have to continue to let the fund raising artillery be handled by the usual suspects.

The good news is that other regiments continue to hold steadfast in their roles. General Shivangi Datar will focus on dashboard development. Would be happy if she also engages in stickiness studies of dashboard usage. (Personal view, not group’s). Shivangi talked about her 40 acre forest in Konkan, near Sangameshwar. It is 300 km from Pune, that’s a long cycle ride. We can plan doing something there in 2024. 

Sanjeev Jagtap has just returned from a long stay in Europe. He is happy with backending our database work, as it means he can work in asynchronous mode. Met with Madhavi Phatak after a long time. She can guide us on volunteer management, as she has been doing an amazing job of doing that at Ecological Society. Gen Nirmala can benefit from her advice.

General Nirmala is going on a 1 month detox to the rural settings of Velhe in September. She has promised that she will be available on phone and mail. Hope she continues to command us remotely. Gen Nirmala has been overloaded with a lot of fundraising work. She is looking for volunteers to manage volunteers. Would anyone want to volunteer for that?

Next get together is a day long review meet at 14 Trees Vetale. We will be meeting on Monday, 2-Oct. Hope all the attendees can make it. Would like to publish an agenda in advance, so that we can be a bit more productive during our time together. Am adding my tuppence here – please add in your points:

Getting people to actually dig holes for tree plantation

Making our own food. Shilpa has promised to get oil and salt. Rest can pitch in with their own ideas and food. I can get fruits.

Visit to Pur site to see if we can host visits there without touching Vetale

IIT Gandhinagar Notes, 2 Sep 23

Background

IIT Kanpur, Ecological Society, Pune and 14 Trees have jointly been organising academia-NGO-industry interactions to develop a road-map towards India becoming Net Zero by 2070. Like in any exam, seriousness levels increase only when deadlines come closer. So instead of waiting till 2069 to announce that we have flunked our exams, we have been prepping up by having semester tests. These tests have been happening across the country. Our first was at GIPE, Pune in March 2022. This was followed by the second one at IIT Kanpur in Oct 22. The third one happened in IIT Gandhinagar in Sep 23. The focus of this meeting was green policy and financing.  

Academic Block at IIT GN, where the meeting was held

IIT Gandhinagar started in 2008 – and has come a long way since then. We were hosted by Dr C N Pandey of the Dr Kiran C Patel Centre for Sustainable Development. Prof Amit Prashant, Dean R&D, IIT Gandhinagar was present at the inauguration. We were told that representatives from Adani and Reliance were also present, though we did not hear any of them speak. We were happy to have inputs from IIM A for the meet, but were disappointed that NID was missing from the action.

Macro Numbers

We need an annual reduction of 500 gigaton of CO2 to meet the 1.5 degree C temperature target and a 1350 gigaton reduction to meet the 2 degree Celsius average temperature reduction target. Of these large numbers, India is only doing 2.5 billion tons of emissions today. China has overtaken the United States in CO2 emissions. With CO2, we need to remember that the gas stacks up. CO2 can accumulate and stay in the environment for up to a thousand years. Today only 15% of our carbon dioxide is being neutralised by forests and 12% of our carbon dioxide equivalent gases.

India wants to be part of the solution even when it is not part of the problem. If every country had per capita emissions like India, climate change would not have happened. As per IPCC report of 2023, India contributes only 2.5% of global emissions. On a land use basis, we are just right – as India has 2.5% of the world’s total land area. The total emissions of South Asia, which accounts for 24% of the human population, is just 4% of the global total.

Quiz: IIT GN’s Triangular Tower overlooking the Sabarmati. It has 168 steps.So how tall is it?

Professor Mausami from IIT Kanpur talked about the variance in estimates for climate finance globally. The Oxfam report reported that 40 billion dollars was spent on climate change and OECD claims that the budget has been 80 billion dollars. The Indian target of net zero by 2070 is subject to funds flow from developed countries to India.

Dr Bhat leads the Indian climate negotiation team in global conferences and meetings. Net zero emissions of the West are more critical because they are at a higher base of pollution. The West is trying to create accounting fraud by claiming CNG as being green and not a fossil fuel. There are three things that are important in climate finance: scale, scope and speed. Finance should be incremental and new, and ideally from public sources.

In today’s world, energy security seems to have taken priority over green energy.  Any energy is better than no energy.. Even for RE, 97% of the solar supply chain is controlled by China. We need to look at consumption based accounting of energy instead of production based accounting of energy.  We need to be willing to pay the price of climate change. If it’s our own folly, we should pay for it. Tax payers are, after all, the biggest reinsurers in the world.

Amphitheatre. Hope next time we meet at IIT GN, this would be the venue

Policy Making in Green Project Financing

We wanted to understand how the government policy making framework operates. For example, there is actually no document highlighting our renewable energy policy. But there are broad targets. Targets and guidelines may have ideological backgrounds. For example, in the previous UPA government, the right to education act, the right to food act were based on recommendations made by the National Advisory Council. Off late, the role of bureaucrats in policy making has become smaller and smaller as our ministers become smarter and smarter. We have seen policy making becoming more consultative and inclusive.

Anurag Goyal is the Senior Advisor, Niti Aayog, Government of India. He is from the IRS cadre. He also happens to be Pravin’s batchmate at IIT Kanpur. Anurag is a specialist in public finance. Where are the finances for green projects coming from? Our preference is for long term low cost capital. From 2014 to 2023, 23 billion dollars were raised by issuing green bonds. Most of these bonds were issued by the private sector including independent power producers like Adani. In 2022-23, we have had the government itself issuing sovereign green bonds. Rs. 16,000 crores worth of sovereign bonds, with yields which are 5 to 6 basis points less than G-Secs, were lapped up by Indian investors. The issue was oversubscribed 5 times. The government is looking at ways to get international pension funds to become investors in these sovereign green bonds.

What happens to financially non viable projects, think off grid solar in Ladakh or offshore wind energy in Tamilnadu. The government usually does viability gap funding. This is done for up to 40% of the project cost. Instead of just looking at financial returns of these projects, a macro view is taken about the economic viability. For infrastructure projects like roads and railways there are established norms for finding out the economic viability. The challenge is when we have to create models for greenfield projects where precedents don’t exist: think ethanol blending. The costs are clear, the benefits are a bit hazy. In such a scenario, what a nation needs is a pipeline of projects so that enough pilots can happen to understand real cost benefits instead of academic interpretations of the same.

Anurag talked about how policy making is complicated because of the interconnections. He took an example of fertilisers. Food is important. The green revolution happened and the use of fossil fuels went up. Rice production increased. More irrigation was required. Micro irrigation was thought of. Subsidies were given for fertilisers. Yields were better than expected. Stocks built up. PDS was started.

We need to play with subsidies and tax rebates. For example, we helped solar adoption by allowing for accelerated depreciation. The government is looking at the same for biogas compression equipment. We are trying to create a market for these new products. If we are too aggressive in adoption of green hydrogen, there will be an impact on competitiveness, in both domestic markets and exports. So adoptions have to be incremental. We are also working on alternative technologies like gasification of coal. This is a project 100% funded by the government of India. We are also looking at projects like advanced supercritical thermal plants, where steam operates at temperatures of 700 degree Celsius. This requires totally new materials.

At this point, we had a question about wastewater treatment projects at village level, which usually are not financially viable, do not have any policy making by Niti aayog? It’s not that governments don’t fund anything which does not have economic viability, primary education being a case in point.The Indian public is not ready for a pay per use for toilets.

Governments are happy spending money for capex, but frown on continued support for opex. So the bias is for projects which have opex revenue like local taxation or pay per use charges. For green projects, user charges for fund raising should be preferred. If the state government is paying for the Mumbai Metro, the taxpayers in Pune can ask the state what is in it for them? Anurag cited the Delhi model where public toilets have been financed, for both capex and opex using advertising income.

There was a question from the audience about handicraft promotion because it is green, but if we add logistics emissions in this then it turns out it’s not so green. The most sustainable products are where we have local producers and local markets.

Getting the Energy Mix Right

Indushekhar Chaturvedi is the ex Secretary, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, Government of India and Visiting Professor of Practice, IIT Kanpur. He talked about the energy mix for tomorrow’s India. Most of our focus has been on the transportation sector, but it is important that we also look at sectors like steel and fertilisers. Green hydrogen will play an important role in the fertiliser sector. In 2014, we only had 4 GW of solar production and 2023 has seen it grow to 71 GW. Solar has seen good growth, but wind has not been as rapid. One of the reasons: limitations of locations that are wind friendly. The road ahead is a long one – because in spite of all these investments, in 2023, only 4% of the energy that we use is from solar and wind.

Solar Pathway

One of the policy decisions that the government had to take was about local manufacturing of solar panels. Battery storage adds to the energy cost in a renewable energy project. With an increase in the capital expenditure of Indian made solar panels, the electricity generation costs also go up. Bids for supply of solar kWH bottomed at Rs. 1.99 per unit in 2019. The figure in 2023 is Rs. 2.6. The government kickstarted this sector by buying electricity at even Rs. 13 per unit from private producers of solar power. Even today, private producers are assured by discoms of lifting all that they produce. In addition, for import of solar panels, only basic custom duties are charged.

Subsidies are important for any new technology. Loopholes will always be there, but that does not mean we can do away with subsidies. For solar, the big challenges are land and evacuation of power. Typical transmission projects take 24 months to complete. For transmission lines you need permissions for right of way and also environmental clearances. Most people in project development consider the forest and environment departments as irritants that have to be tolerated. Indu’s opinion was that we need to be ready for short term pain to get long term gain. Our environmental clearances are highly centralised. Even for projects as small as five hectares Central Government permissions are needed. There is a problem of competency and capacity to implement these clearances at state level.

The hard to abate sectors are going to be steel, long haul transport and fertilisers. India has always done things incrementally. Probably the only exception was the 1991 liberalisation and that too was forced on to the nation by the foreign exchange crisis.

Hydrogen is uncharted territory. So was solar in 2010. In fact the moderator remembered his own pessimism about the national solar mission. But it worked. Today all major economies have come up with a hydrogen policy. (My own view is that this has been thanks to intense lobbying by the oil majors, who view hydrogen DNA, pardon the pun, as a carbon copy of petroleum.) Indushekhar feels that the first use would be in refineries and fertiliser plants. Green urea is a good example of the use of green hydrogen. Also, like with ethanol, a beginning can be made by blending of green and grey hydrogen to help economic viability.

There was a question related to recovering energy in heat waste. 30 to 60% energy is wasted as heat in steel, power and chemical plants. The moderator felt that there is already good recovery happening in steel plants with waste heat boilers etc.

Climate Change Policy Making

The next speaker was Prof Amit Garg, Professor of Public Systems Group at IIM Ahmedabad who spoke about climate finance, or the funding for transition to more appropriate energy. He is of the view that climate fund allocations should be based on the needs and wants of a country.

But before we talk of allocations, we need to look at fund availability. What financial muscle are donors pulling for climate change? Most international bodies are of the point of view that this transition will require as much as 4 trillion dollars per annum for managing this transition. Yet, total committed donations for this transition by the development nations is just 100 billion dollars p.a. for the next 5 years. And 63% of these funds are going to developed economies: US and Europe. 25% are headed to the world’s largest polluter, China. India is just getting 3% of these funds. Discussion then veered towards peak energy. Europe saw peak energy in 2000. The United States in 2003, but India and China are still some time away from their peaks. Though there is pressure from the West for an early peaking, the developing argument is about getting the time and space to work on historical development deficits.

Holed up with Yogi. Picture courtesy: Center for Creative Learning, IIT GN

Prof Amit Garg is of the opinion that a country like India, in its journey from a higher to a lower emission state, does not need investments in solar and batteries. Policy is being influenced by industrial lobbies worried about their own energy security in a fossil free fuel future. Prof Garf accords a higher priority to the farm sector. Any financing to be sustainable has to have a minimum rate of return of 0%. We need to link interest rates to greenhouse gas emissions.

Agriculture accounts for 18% of the emission but hardly any percent of the spend.  Why not promote bio energy? Adaptation not mitigation should be a priority. And yet to find that more than 90% of green budgets are being spent on mitigation. We have to involve people in decision making. We have to delink a country rating from project rating. A solar panel will reduce greenhouse gases by the same amount whether it is installed in Somalia or in California. IPCC has come up with a green taxonomy having identified 38 technologies which are common ground. Any of these technologies should be able to attract finance at the rate of 4%. Indushekhar’s point of view was that the potential for biomass is limited in India. And it’s too expensive. Has not been very successful. For any project the local context is important.

If a country has an energy resource, it will use it. The US will continue to rely on shale gas and India will continue to use coal. Any energy is better than no energy. Indonesia committed to reducing usage of coal, but still exports 81 billion dollars of coal every year. As an afterthought, why is it that greens do not consider nuclear energy as green?

It’s time that climate change percolates every aspect of our community. For example it should be part of every tender document. Climate change is going to impact infrastructure budgets of up to 25% just to mitigate effects of disasters caused by episodes of rainfall etc. Climate resilience needs to be factored in the market price of an asset.

Financing transition to transition financing: In solar, the bulk of investing is from domestic sources. The cost of capital decides the success of a project as in the case of solar and wind cost of fuel is zero. Foreign exchange risks need to be looked at. And we need to look at investments in renewable energy projects as a system which exists outside country boundary lines. There is also a need to look at risk getting mitigated when you are looking at projects which are off grid.

Vidhi was another participant from IIM Ahmedabad. She advocated standard norms for disclosure of green initiatives to ensure that there is no green-washing. SEBI has mandated the top thousand companies to include a sustainability report in balance sheets.

Mitigation

IISER Pune’s Prof Bijoy Thomas talked about the normative concerns in the green transition. The top 1% of the global population produces 1000 times more carbon dioxide than the bottom one percent. In India we  have seen a decrease in inequality in society from 1950 to the 1980, but from the 1980’s onwards the trend has reversed and the gap has started to increase. Livelihoods and biodiversity linkages are important in sustainability projects. Covid was a watershed movement in our recent past. This slowdown was good for the environment, but saw migrants walking hundreds of km to their villages.

The variation in food budget for the poor and the rich is not very high but it is the non food and the luxury items which she is most of this variation. Professor Bijoy George talked about drip irrigation not picking up even in water scarce regions. There could be multiple reasons. It involves capital expenditure. This poor support extension and more importantly the staging of the nozzles because of salts.

Pie Table

Eucalyptus was at one point of time the favourite tree in social forestry because of its rapid growth rates. It took some time for the social forestry officials to realise the water table impact of this tree. Private farmers liked eucalyptus because it required less labour. And so better self dignity.

Development plans need to take care of lakes and water bodies. The simple thumb rule in water is do not block it but give way for it to flow. In Srinagar we attempted to control the course of the river, when Dhaka, by design, allowed the flood waters to overflow and accept the damage. Projects like the Navi Mumbai airport will have to take care of this. Academia needs to help the government choose technologies that are more sustainable and appropriate for those local contexts. The initial boost for these technologies can come from government grants and later on the private sector can place their bets.

View of Sabarmati from Triangular Tower

Adaptations are modular in nature. When we talk of climate change we talk about uncertainty. Let’s take an example of storm drains. Drains get used for just 5 to 6 days in a year. But it has to work, when it has to work. The Chennai Municipal Corporation earlier norms for storm water drain system is a 5 day rainfall of 49 mm per day. After the flooding that the city has seen in the last 5 years, the revised norms are 79 millimetres of rain per day. This has doubled the Investment in storm water drains.

At the same time that Shimla was facing a problem of floods, it was also facing a problem of drinking water. The hills above Shimla lost their tree cover. Water that was flowing down had a lot of sedimentation, in the absence of root based filtration. Nature based solutions are better than man made solutions. Smaller solutions are better than large scale solutions.

Trees should not be viewed as just carbon sequestration dustbins. The quality of forests are degrading as tree density is growing down. Poverty of the local people and pressures of human population growth are factors for this. Our forestation policy has not bothered about livelihoods of forest jewellers. We allow them firewood in head loads. This increases the burden on the forest. The positive side-effect has been fewer forest fires in India compared to the United States, Australia and Europe. We need to have ecologically sustainable projects in tribal areas close to forests. So that we can have more employment opportunities and reduce the load on the forest. For example, ayurvedic medicine manufacturing and marketing.

Grasslands

Steel Bamboo Fence

Anuja Malhotra of ATree talked about how governments tend to ignore the carbon sequestration of grasslands. There is much more below the ground than can be seen above the ground. We still operate with a colonial mindset and anything which is not a forest or not agriculture is called wasteland. Even today, in government classification, the glaciers in Himalayas, the source of all agriculture in Northern India, are classified as wastelands!

We had an interesting debate on the great Indian bustard. Indushekhar ji observed that good news is no news. Media and society are all tuned for negativity. So the molehill became a mountain. The great Indian bustard habitat is only on grasslands. One of the threats to grasslands comes because of their flatness. So it’s easy to construct and easy to approach. Industries love this. In spite of all our efforts the great Indian bustard might still be on its way to extinction. And we also know the hundreds of crores that the government has been trying to spend in getting extinct creatures like the cheetahs back into the ecosystem. The tragedy is that this bird rarely leaves the ground and it also flies very low. For this reason it has already been hunted to extinction in almost every state of India, except Rajasthan. And even there when these birds cross the fence to fly to Pakistan, our friends across the border make meat out of them. One of the ways out could have been to start a conservation centre for rearing this word.

Red Naped Ibis frolicking on the Campus Lawn grasslands

The Supreme Court mandated that for a RE project which was encroaching on the great Indian bustard National Park, the distribution power evacuation lines will have to be underground. This increased power evacuation costs by 5 times. (Could we raise the height of the transmission tower?)So there was a point of view that this supreme court judgement was shoddily drafted.

Are we missing the grass for the trees? States like Gujarat have made a beginning. Grasslands in Gujarat have been declared as forest land and so they are protected. Given Gujarat’s large cattle population and high frequency of droughts, conservation is important for them. The Bani grasslands are Asia’s largest. Grasslands also need sparse trees because they get the nutrients from deeper levels to the surface. Salinity is unfortunately increasing in the grasslands and there is a new variety of Babul which has now become invasive. This was introduced under government schemes.

Case Study – Kheda

Shivani Goyal is an IAS officer of the Gujarat cadre. She was earlier managing director of GEDA – the Gujarat Energy Development Agency. She is currently the district development officer of Kheda. She talked about the journey of solar energy adoption in Gujarat. The state has been at the forefront of rooftop solar. And it has now taken over leadership in wind. Gujarat has more than 10 GW of wind energy installed, and has just overtaken Tami Nadu.

Most of Shivani’s talk was on the environment issues at Kheda. One of the problems she discussed was the handling of disasters, in the context of encroachment of flood basins. Handling these encroachments is a social political challenge. We need to associate climate risks with infrastructure projects. Roads that get washed away in monsoons are not sustainable. The question planners need to ask: Does nature have the capacity to hold this infrastructure?

Of 100 crores of Panchayat funds, 60% are being spent on water and sanitation. Kheda is an agricultural dominated district. Jo dikhta hai, wo bikta hai: Infrastructure like roads and bridges are vote banks. But reviving groundwater is the real challenge. Every year government funds are used to dig more borewells and we are digging even deeper. There is absolutely no work on the recharging of existing borewells. You don’t get any votes for such work. There are no votes for trees either.

Bamboo Art

She talked of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan and the toilet scheme in particular. Kheda has covered 98% of the 520 villages by now in this scheme. This has given dignity to women in villages. Projects related to composting, soak pits and grey water handling are also going on. The district has a budget of 15 crores for these projects. The challenge is in maintenance. Compost pits are getting converted to garbage dumps. Open defecation is happening in spite of having toilets. How can we improve our environmental consciousness and understanding?

Directions for the Future

Ajay Pathak chaired the concluding session. Zero hunger and Zero poverty need precedence over zero emission. But our thinking is still very bania-like. Pravin’s challenge to the banias was: Can conservation drive economic growth? A good solution is one that works for both adaptation and mitigation. It will not be an either or in that case. We need to identify such solutions. I would advocate that veganism is one such solution. Apart from the highest human population, India also has the highest cattle population. Hopefully, in our next meet, at either Ashoka University or Atree, we can discuss the impact of a vegan diet on climate change.

GDP and energy usage have always had common trajectories. In human centric development, solutions to problems are always techno-economic. If viability can be measured in economic terms, funding is available. What is required is a new socio ecological perspective. We need to transition to life centric models. Instead of pure economics, we need to look at overall wellbeing. A circular use of material and energy. Ajay added that the easiest solutions involve a per capita decrease of energy. This will also lead to a more equitable distribution of energy.

Insurance companies would be interested in understanding strategies related to mitigation of loss and damage. Pravin emphasised on the importance of pilots. We need more academics and NGO coordination. One idea that we had discussed and is still not seeing the light of the day is a simple Google Doc – where people post a problem – and industry / faculty agree to mentor. Students who are interested take up that problem – and is part of their thesis.

We need to also look at our medical and healthcare sector. Our aim should not be solely to extend life spans. If we start looking at healthspan instead of lifespan, there can be a lot of savings. Today, our lifespan focus is creating a lot of economic value, but at the cost of the quality of life. We need to look at preventive and not curative healthcare.

Cycling Mural at Sports Block

In Germany, models exist where producers and consumers share the risk. For example, the same amount of money will go to a farmer even if there is a crop failure, because the consumer promises to accept whatever yield of produce from his farm.

IIT GN has decided to take some baby steps towards its own Net Zero project. Prof Ashish Garg and the IIT K team would share learnings with the IIT GN team to help draft the game plan for this journey. Professor Rajiv of IITK talked about how CSR can be attracted by repackaging proposals. Private sector likes to have investments in CSR projects which get them visibility. Reducing the emissions of an existing building can be a better branding solution than investing in trees.

Towards the end of the day, Professor Rajat Moona, the IIT GN director, spent an hour with us. In his short speech, he talked about a very simple aspect – clothing. Man is the only animal that wears clothes. We use 500 trillion kg of clothing. Even if 10% of this has to be changed annually, we are  looking at 50 trillion kg of clothing being dumped every year. And most of this disposal would not be sustainable. The planet has its own way of recovering from these disasters. We hope that we don’t have to end up with the ultimate solution for planet rejuvenation – eliminating the human species!

Quiz Time: How many pins got used in making this portrait of APJ Abdul Kalam?

Courtesy: Center for Creative Learning at IIT GN

14 T Report, 17-Sep-23 

We had reached fairly early, thanks to Ajay enforcing an early start. One disappointment was that I did not end up trekking even one inch in this visit. It’s a sacrilege – and I have only myself to blame. Everybody landed up around the same time. 14 volunteers at 14 Trees. The difference this time was that Praveen had specific projects lined up for the volunteers. So this report is limited to my own work – and the small set of volunteers that I interacted with. New volunteers I met:

Rahul. Works with HSBC, where he looks after security features like face recognitions and OTPs. He has 150 people in his team, spread across India, China and the US. One interesting idea he shared was to promote a corporate scheme, where when an employee joins, the company plants a welcome tree for him. He has also offered to get 14 Trees tech work done by Tech for good – NGO codes by HSBC team. Here are some guidleines he offered for such projects: Definitive requirement by NGO is important, Clear start and end point and Important test cases.

Prerna: Works with UNDP in the field of disaster impacts of climate change. She is the better half of Aakash, the veteran volunteer at 14 Trees. Both know each other from IIT G days. She has been impressed with the optimism at 14 T, in contrast to the pessimism of UNDP. She finds our vision of scale to be quite impressive. The good news is that she will be active in the volunteer coordination space. 

Aparna: Is doing her second post doc at IISER. Is working on a project related to anode and cathode material of sodium ion batteries. She has been quite influenced by Prof Komaba, who is a leader in sustainable Na ion batteries. Her caveat was that it will be having half the energy density of LFP, so the first applications may be in solar storage. She also talked of an interesting concept – anode or cathode free batteries. Must invited her for a session with our R and D team at Chheda. She has offered to help out in the CSR space. Nirmala and Yours Truly are ecstatic that we have great company in our team now.

Praveen got me to work on a grants proposal from some government agency. There was some confusion in my task assignment. This was the quantitative data asked for: No of hectares, No of people impacted, Farmer beneficiaries, worker beneficiaries. This data was available with Praveen. I realised that he only needed a qualitative introduction to this data. The proposal had to be such that we would get a chance to present. My suggestion was to add a link to the 14 Trees film. I recycled an abridged version of the story that I had made a few months ago. Hopefully, it got used in the submission that was made on 19-Sep. 

Grants Proposal for Restoration Project

14Trees’ mission is to reforest India.  In 2012, we started looking out for land to pilot this mission. After searching for a year, we came across a site near Vetale, about 29 km from Pune’s largest industrial belt of Chakan. We started with 4 acres. The forest has grown to 200 acres today. Seeing is believing – and this is one of the reasons the movement has spread to 60+ surrounding gram panchayats. 

Most Vetale farmers bring piped water from the neighbouring dam. 14T does not take dam water. If they do that, the Vetale experiment will not be replicable. So the reliance has to be on rainfed ponds. Reducing rainwater runoff, also has the added advantage of top soil retention. After purchasing the land in 2014, the first 4 years were spent in building check dams and ponds. Vetale wells have seen an increase in groundwater – so this has meant better agricultural yields. 14 T at an individual level does not generate any positive RoI commercially, but looking at the community as a whole – the frugal investments yield handsome returns.

14 Tree’s survival rates are almost 100%. One of the key reasons: every tree has an identity. A human’s name gets attached to it the day it’s planted. Once people have their ‘named trees’ standing on the land, social pressure will automatically build for keeping the asset protected forever. There are adivasi bastis not very far from the farm – and today about 100 people from neighbouring hamlets are employed as daily wage workers at 14 trees. Most of the work is non-automated by design. 

In July 2021, some Indian Forest Service officers spent a day with us. Their visit was to learn about how private initiatives can complement government work. For officers who are used to top down planning, this experiment from the bottom up was something to cheer about. The last word was by Jaykumaran, a young officer from Rameshwaram, Tamil Nadu. In Jayraman’s filmy style, he contrasted the arranged marriage that most officers of his cadre have with forests vs the love marriage that has happened at 14Trees.

Here’s a short film about the 14 Trees Experiment: https://youtu.be/V-fZmDAyFVs?si=hCz9LS13UppRF4gi

I was witness to an interesting conversation between Anant, Chaitanya and Rahul – about the specs for the new tree logging app. The creator of our old app has shifted base to UK, so we cannot upgrade. And Praveen has decided that it is too cumbersome to rewrite his code. We have 2 students from IIT Bombay who are doing this as part of their academic coursework. My suggestion would be that Praveen lays down standards for documentation in coding, so that we don’t have issues in maintaining all the software IP that we are creating. 

Can we pick up site details from the uploading phone’s GPS location?

Network not there, so can’t upload. Some photos are not getting transferred, even with data switched off. So buffering required

Should be editable – as there are sometimes wrong entries for tree type

Should be able to edit to remove duplicates

Chaitanya Bhagwat was present – and we were to receive a crasher on Notion, the Google Doc inspired Project management tool. That is to happen on 20-Sep, but I will not be able to attend. As with the fundraising meet, we again made an attempt to hand over databases ownership to people. This is what was proposed:

Sanjeev N – Site visitors, Google Albums upload

Sanjeev J – dB, tree types, non foundation land dB, Biodiversity survey dB

Shivangi – Plots

Sheetal – Ponds

Manjushree –  Biodiversity survey dB

Plots – Sanjeev N has worked on this. He will share with Shivangi

Atul Gopal – Donors

I am not too sure about what dB ownership means. And at my age, I am not tech savvy enough to keep on learning new softwares. So though I have accepted the database ownership – I will probably not be able to do justice to it. 

Bajaj FinServ Visit, 26 Oct 23

Action Points

Invite Sanika, Nirmala’s daughter, to visit Peepal Tree School.

Get feedback on volunteer’s JDs

Build a business model for the nursery

Nudge Shashi to get Kurush and Anupam to visit

Anita to go through tour design notes and comment.

Anant – kudal and phavda in place for next visit

Work on toilet system sketches with Anant

Picked up Nirmala from Baner Pashan link road at 0630 hrs. My father-in-law also accompanied us. During the journey, Nirmala and yours truly chatted up about creating more structure around volunteer work. What follows are my personal viewpoints. They may not be that of Nirmala’s or Praveen’s – so please swallow these opinions with some kilograms of salt. 

Running a volunteer based organisation represents a very different challenge compared to the easy structure that comes in when you have employees. The big plus is the levels of commitment and involvement. The big minus is getting things done in time. We started the journey by bitching about ‘The go with the flow’ volunteering philosophy that Praveen has been espousing as core to our activities. By the end of the day, we had decided that going with the flow was probably the best way going ahead. What is required is an identification of who goes with what flow. Most of these decisions will be made by the volunteers themselves. Here are some suggested flows, based on my limited interactions with some of our volunteers:

Nirmala: Building a path for growth and scale for 14 T. Retaining and motivating our volunteer community.

Prerna: Documentation, Building overall systems and processes. 

Sanjiv Naik: Data management. Working with the site team to make our systems user friendly. Potentially, working with our water team – and mentoring local or community water related entrepreneurship. 

Sanjeev Jagtap: Biodiversity. Acting as a sound board for our tech team and also being the checker to the tech makers.

Anita Marathe: Tours Coordination, both with visitors and our tour guides. Building systems and processes for managing visits – which is our only ‘visiting card/’. 

Shivangi Datar: Dashboard development and maintenance. Given her own experience with her 40 acre plot in Konkan, helping manage our forest ecosystem when it reaches a higher level of maturity.

Madhavi Phatak: Coordinating with Ecological Society Alumni. CSR coordination.

Ajay Phatak: Engaging with academic institutions. In future, my wishlist for Ajay would be to help design a volunteer induction and training program.

Chetan Agarwal: Managing cashflows. Ensuring that we don’t fall foul of any regulatory authorities.

Medha Bhagwat: Handling creatives. Design of tour experiences. Working with Aditi Deo to create ‘products’ for our outreach.

Hemant Joshi, Giri Sakhrani and Kiran Deshpande: Fundraising. Networking and getting leads for CSR.

Atul Gopal: Onboarding volunteers. 

Thursdays are good days for travel – industrial holiday means smaller jam at Chakan. Drove at slightly higher speeds and we were in Vetale at 0810 hrs. The Bajaj team was expected at 0930 hrs. We used that time to chat up with Anant, who following in Pravin’s footsteps, has always got some new ideas to discuss in every visit. He talked of Gulab, one of our volunteers, becoming a labour contractor – and helping supply labour during harvesting season. The local villagers seem to be upset that they cannot get any labour for farm activities – as 14T has sucked out all the labour into reforestation. The villagers are ready to pay up to Rs. 500 per day, thanks to labour shortage. The 14 T local team members prefer a lower assured wage than the vagaries of market wage fluctuations. 

On the subject of entrepreneurship, I feel that we need to have some agni pariksha s for our local budding entrepreneurs. Self employment is I think the first stage of becoming an entrepreneur. If you can feed your own family, then it is time to start helping others. What this implies is that we need to start by creating communities of self employed: artisans, wood workers, pond diggers, medicinal herb growers. From these communities, we will have entrepreneurs who will emerge.

One of the interesting entrepreneurship case studies is Anant’s own nursery venture. Pravin has invested heavily in ‘seeding’ it. The nursery has a monthly overhead of almost Rs. 1.5 lakh. Till date, we have not been able to get too many non 14 T clients for the nursery. As a result, we end up subsidising the wage bills, making the nursery a cost center rather than a profit center. For the nursery to become a profit center, Anant will need to be active in selling and promoting this venture. Given our high degree of reliance on Anant for managing the Vetale site, it is unlikely that he will get the bandwidth to do that.

The Bajaj team landed at 0945 hrs. Shashi Pillai is from Nasik and has had past experience in the insurance and lending sector. Meha Agarwal is from Amravati and has worked with quite a few NGOs before she joined Bajaj. Both are currently part of the HR team at Bajaj Finance. We learnt from them that Kurush, who heads CSR, is the person who we need to rope in for a visit soon. We had arranged for breakfast and tea at the 14 T gate itself. This was an experiment in ‘site experience’ management. We wanted our visitors to go in chronological order of site development. To end with what a site looks like after 7 years, not begin with it. 

Meha and Shashi had already had breakfast on the way. (Note to self: Can we just start off our visitors with a cup of tea instead of breakfast? That way, energy levels for the trek can be high and maybe we can serve our lunch early when they return.) We did some basic introductions over breakfast and within 15 minutes we were on our way. Trekked through the forest along the stream. In hindsight, I should have taken them through the longer bike wallah way. Next time. Save the best for the last. Another problem with the stream trek up is that quite a few of our friends end up taking breaks as the slope in one section is quite high. Meha, who was recovering from a viral infection, had to take a 10  minute break midway through the climb. On reaching the top, we could see what should have been our first sight: grassland. From an experience management perspective, October grass is a bad idea. It still looks quite endearing and romantic. What we need is a total bald patch of land with zero topsoil. We need to have a control sample which serves to show the before-after effect to a visitor.

From there we walked to the pond. Sitting on rocks, we spent 10 minutes discussing how we manage water. It was a zen experience – next time, we should spend the first 10 minutes just meditating on water and life before the talk starts. We then trekked to the circular hut, where we discussed the 14 T experience of managing the social ecosystem. After that Gulab took us to the plantation site. This time, we started by Meha and Shashi actually digging. We discovered that our hole had also been a home for a frog, which for lack of better vocabulary – had to now find a new ‘hibernation’ spot. (Note to self: next time, need a kudal for digging, the phavda is a bad tool for that.) Tree plantation was done after that – where both contributed by putting in the soil around the sapling. We did not have our usual chai break at the round hut. Meha was offered a bike ride back to the site, and she accepted it after some persuasion. 

We were back at the reception area around 1145 hrs. Nirmala spent time with the Bajaj team for the next 45 minutes, as I spent time with Anant understanding the effluent treatment system for our toilet blocks. The septic tank overflow is piped through a series of 3 tanks. All the flows happen due to gravity. Each of the overflow tanks has a pipe placed about 2 ft from the top. Each tank is filled with stone at the bottom and gravel at the top. In case of the first tank, there was also soil at the top, to help growth of the canana indica. The final tank discharge went to a small water body, from where it is picked up for irrigation. There was absolutely no foul smell at any place. Am going to take Anant’s help tp develop a similar system for our Shirwal school.

We had an early lunch at 1230 hrs. We walked them out to the main gate through the nursery. (Note to self: this is a practice which needs to be done religiously.) Anant talked about our plant library and managed to convince both of them that they need to take back some saplings as souvenirs from the trip. Happy to report that Anand did Rs. 600 of sales!        

IIT Bombay, CTARA Team Visit, 21, 22-Oct 23

Action Points

MoU signed between 14 T and Sahyadri School on native seed banks and local livelihoods. 

Local farmer local seed produce at 14 T – 14 T visitors who buy that rice to pay Sahyadri retail team directly through Google Pay.

Ask local artisans to make reed mats – chattais for 14 T or for visitor sale

Eat food of all colours

Prerna – invite Rohit Patil for a volunteer meet at IISER office

Prerna – Coordinate with Prof Anand Rao and share appropriate Notion links with CTARA interested students

Prerna/ Sanjeev – share project ideas from CTARA students. One that I found interesting was using laser engraved stones for tree numbering.

Create a checklist and sequence for tours. We need to start with banjaar land and end at the reception area.

Started from the Felidae factory at 1530 hrs. Sahyadri school was 33 km from there. The target was to reach by 1730 hrs. The battery was full – and so with a generous use of the Pedal Assist mode, could reach Sahyadri school at the planned time. About 3 km after the Chas Kaman dam, you need to take a left and there is a 1.7 km climb to get you to the hilltop plateau on which the school is located. This was my second visit to the school. The last visit was when the daughters were in school, and we were on our way to Nasik. Wanted to show them the place, but the daughters did not fall in love with the concept of a boarding school.

Deepa had called and informed me that the CTARA team had been delayed at Ahope – and would be reaching only at 1930 hrs. We had some watermelons and nimbu-paani at the canteen and then went for a short walk. Missed the sunset but got some amazing lake views. Caught up with Rajesh, who joined as principal 3 months ago. Rajesh was teaching earlier at Daly School in Indore, and before that he has spent time in the corporate world. His wife Uttara is a KG teacher. At Sahyadri school, students enter at grade 4. There are two divisions from grades 4 to 10 and a single division from grade 11 to 12.

Rajesh chatted about his experience of solving conflicts, and the act of attacking the wrong, not the doers of the wrongs. He also mentioned an anecdote where he had to let go of a person as he insisted on a promotion, but the people who would report to him indicated that they would leave if they had to work under this person. The person left. Rajesh met him 10 years later – and our friend confessed that he was still not ready for the role. He had in the meantime changed 3 jobs. Rajesh has shown interest in getting a MoU signed between 14 T and Sahyadri School. Deepa’s interest areas are native seed banks and local livelihoods. We can offer practical labs at 14 Trees for both. We have also indicated to Deepa that she can stock her local rice varieties that she procures from farmers, and we can ask 14 T visitors who buy that rice to pay her retail team directly through Google Pay. Pravin to advise how he wants to take this forward. 

The CTARA team reached around 1945 hrs. Had started drizzling by then. We got them to check in at the guesthouse. Most of them stayed in small dormitories where you can accommodate about 4 people in a room. I stayed alone in a two seater room. The total capacity is about 70 beds. Two professors had accompanied the team, Anand Rao and Bakul Rao. (I don’t think they are related to each other.) Anand was accompanied by his son Chaitanya. Chaitanya studies at the KV i n IIT Bombay and is in grade 8. We had a lovely dinner at the canteen. Could say no to the paneer, but succumbed to the sins of black rice kheer. After dinner, we walked down to the staff room, where Deepa had an hour long presentation on the work that she does. Got nostalgic when we sat on the reed mats (chattais) – and have decided that we will get some for Peepal Tree School too. (We should actually use these in 14 T too)

Deepa’s PPT was a generic one about seed independence. Deepa estimates that there are more than 1 lakh varieties of rice that exist, of which in India we have only been able to get seeds of 10,000. And how hybrids have reduced crop diversity. She talked about organic carbon. Googled for what that means. Organic matter makes up just 2–10% of most soil’s mass and has an important role in the biological function of agricultural soils. Organic matter contributes to nutrient retention and turnover, soil structure, moisture retention and availability, degradation of pollutants, and carbon sequestration. Soil organic matter is difficult to measure directly, so laboratories tend to measure and report Soil organic carbon.

We talked of monoculture inside agriculture. Wanted to know Deepa’s view of adopting a https://vanyaorganic.com/ kind of farm. This is a multilevel farming experiment being done by my friend Patanjali Jha on the banks of the Narmada near Indore. Her only comment on this was about the high labor cost associated with harvesting produce. 

Another jargon she threw at us during the PPT was anthocyanin. This came about when we saw purple rice patches in the middle of all the greens. Here is google gyan on the same. Anthocyanins are a group of deep red, purple and blue pigments found in plants. They’re part of a larger category of plant-based chemicals called flavonoids. Flavonoids are abundant in all parts of plants: fruits, seeds, shoots, flowers and leaves. They help plants reproduce by attracting pollinators and protect plants from environmental stressors like UV ultraviolet light, drought and cold. Research shows that flavonoids are also powerful nutrients and may help explain why plant-based diets are consistently associated with health benefits. This is due, in part, to their antioxidant properties. Antioxidants destroy unstable molecules called free radicals that can damage your cells. Free radicals occur naturally as a by-product of metabolism, as well as from environmental exposure to pollution, cigarette smoke, alcohol, sunlight and harmful chemicals.

The talk segued very well into the visit to the rice plots in the morning. Deepa has been deeply influenced by the work of Subash Palekar, an agriculturist from Vidarbha. Here is some Wikipedia gyan about Subash.  From 1972 to 1985, while farming with Green Revolution chemical inputs, Subash’s agricultural production increased. But after this date, yields started declining. After searching the causes for three years he concluded agricultural science was inferior to natural farming methods.While at college, Subash had studied tribal peoples’ lifestyles and social structure, and forest ecosystems. He realised the forest does not require human assistance for its existence and growth. The forests have fruit-bearing trees such as Mango, Ber, Tamarind, Jamulum and Custard Apple which feed the forest inhabitants. Therefore, he embarked on research on the natural growth of trees. For twenty years studied forest vegetation, and applied forest principles on his farm. These provided the basis for Zero Budget Natural Farming, his unique approach to farming involving manures and agroecology. 

Sahyadri grows 88 varieties of rice to create seed banks for local farmers. They have also started working on millets now. They have plots for jowar, varai and even a few vegetables like okra. Each of these plots is about 5,000 sq ft and rice is planted in a 6 inch by 10 inch grid. Each rice stack is formed by transplanting three seedlings. She wants to get that down to 1 soon. All seedlings are planted at the same time. We were surprised by the diversity of colors, sizes, heights and maturity of the rice plots. There is diversity in water requirements too. We quizzed Deepa about how she manages that. The plots are on a slope – and the ones that require low water are planted on the upper sides of the slopes. Make-up water is pumped through a 5 HP pump if there is no rain for a couple of weeks. It takes half an hour of pimping to irrigate a 5,000 sq ft plot. The main fertiliser is food waste, leaf litter and jeevamrut, a concoction made of gobar and enzymes which break down nutrients. One can think of jeevamrut culture being similar to the gut culture in human stomachs.

Gobbled down two dosas at the canteen and washed it down with two cups of kaadha. Then got onto my cycle for the ride to Vetale. About a hundred meter downstream of the dam, there is a kachca road which takes you to a bridge over the stream. The road then continues towards the dam and you then climb up to reach the dam height. This kaccha road ends at a  T junction when it meets a tarred road. You need to take a left there to reach Vetale, which is just 2 km from that point. Was there at 14 T in 45 minutes. 

Caught up with Sanjeev and Prerna. There were 3 visitors who had come along with them. Rohit Patil is active with tree plantation activity at Ghodeshwar. He also has created a mini nursery at his place. Works with Sanjeev Jagtap who I am told has also got a saplings nursery. Fun fact: Sanjeev’s nursery is next door on SB road. Must visit him some time‘ Have invited Rohit to catch up at our IISER office. Prerna has chances of increasing the active volunteer pool by getting Rohit involved. The other visitors were a couple who run an IT company. Kiran Deshpande has been mentoring the company. My interaction with them was fairly limited, as Sanjeev Naik was the one who spent time with them.

After a quick bio break by the CTARA team, we started on our trek. The previous day I had a chat with Prof Anand Rao who laid out some expectations from the team: Talk of the social connect, especially about the people who work at the site and also the impact at the village level. The initial plan was to trek up to the Thakar Vasti. Had wanted to show the 19 M.Tech students possible residential opportunities. The M.Tech students have to work for 2 months on a rural internship. They are usually assigned to projects in groups of 2. During that period, they have to homestay in a village. NGO guesthouses and sarpanch houses are on the blacklist for such stays. 

We split the groups into two, Prerna was the guide for the first group and I did duty for the second one. I got delayed with Bakul, and I hope that Prerna would have shown them a pond from up close. We had also planned for a one hour interaction before lunch. Was sunny, so the trek was not very comfortable. The trekking pace was not too high. Bakul, who joined in in spite of having suffered a stroke 3 months ago, had to take a break in between. Managed to send her back on the bike after a water related session in the midway circular hut.

Decision was made to skip Thakar vasti – and return back from the circular hut. We did drop in to check out the tree plantation happening by our visitors team. Had to face some embarrassing questions from the CTARA student team who wanted to actually visit the site where their own trees were going to be planted. Hmm. I think the trees are going to be in gayran plots. The least we can do is send them the dashboard links. Managed to get our local guide, also called Atul, to talk to the group about his own background. He stays in a smal vasti with 5 houses. They have a well and electricity in the vasti. He used to be a driver before he joined 14 T. Has been with us for 3 months.

We returned back around 1230 hrs. Had a session with my group till about 1400 hrs. First was a Q and A. Followed that up by splitting them into groups of 2 and asking them to come up with project ideas. Paper and pen was given to groups – and they have submitted the ideas. We did a quick review of these ideas after lunch. Paper feedback was also taken. Prerna was handed over all the paper. Hope she and Sanjeev are able to document the interesting stuff and put it up on Notion. There were at least 4 students who wanted to work with our tree data. Prerna should get in touch with Prof Anand Rao and share access to these students. Prof Rao and Chaitanya had some work in Pune, so they got a lift back from Sanjiv and Prerna.

Started my cycle ride back around 1540 hrs. The ride back was not so enjoyable – Nasik road is infested with two wheelers who love driving on the wrong side of the road. And getting to the middle of the road during peak traffic hours was not quite safe. Next time, will prefer to stay the night over – and leave early in the morning. Anant has promised more insights on the toilet block construction next time we meet. We cannot expect too much help from Lemnion for the PTS toilet block design. If Anant can share the blueprint, we will get something similar constructed at Shirwal. Reached home at 1930 hrs after doing some veggies shopping in Chakan town and taking a short wada pav break near Moshi.  

14 Trees Meeting Discussion Points, 20-Oct

Focus: Has to be on Trees. And we have to use a project based approach. We should not start a new project till we achieve closure on an old one.

Mentoring: individuals can make a difference. For scaling, we need to also encourage visitors to set up their own backyard 14 Trees. We need to structure mentoring programs by senior volunteers for juniors

Volunteers: Money donations are easy to manage; time donations are not. How are we going to structure volunteer work better? 

Donors: Regular updates on 14T milestones, Idea Exchange Sessions for Donors and Volunteers, Revisit the child-tree, Non monetary engagement of donor, Phone Calls, Short videos, WhatsApp updates, Dashboard links 

Technology: We need to understand what way the tech is going to help us

Pilot projects: Emphasise the 14T culture of experimentation. Cases in point: 

• Increase micro-entrepreneur count, 
• Increase seeded ventures count – green water? Pond Management? 
• Full time Executive Assistant to Pravin, Manual work to visitors, 
• Experience management: Start by making the visitor spend an hour in a location which is typical of the barren land we get when we start work. The idea of Banjar Se Jungle has to be experienced; Spend at least half the post lunch discussion time on Questions and Answers

Volunteer seriousness can be judged by asking them to become tour guides. And having a formal training program for them to enrol as a tour guide.

There are 57 volunteers, around 10-12 are active.

TMTC visit was nice. If we can run our saplings gifting program on their campus, we can get good mileage in Tata group.

Site visits by company folks only if they are ready to become tree parents.

Also companies should get their own employees to become guides.

Group size should be less than 20.

Engage donors by getting volunteers to call them. We can also have volunteers visit with printed reports.

For young volunteers – titles help – for example ‘leadership coach.’

Stipends help – something like 20 K per semester

Sahyadri school teachers can help out us with tours

For CTARA, we would want 2-3 projects done by students – baseline projects would help

Nirmala comments

Anant (and his son) is an inspiration. Learn something new from him in every visit.

Anant spoke about 1) the drip irrigation system he has installed to save costs in the nursery, 2) the plotting  design that his son is helping him do (including the ponds and the native shrubs like kuda locations), 3) the portfolio that his son has devleoped for him, and 4) a possibility of getting a  vehicle as donation that one of the Tata motors employees has offered for 14 Trees.

He also spoke about the failed experiment of manual pump (to be operated by foot) in the past. He says our ponds are deep and the manual energy is not sufficient to pump water. He said the pump धूळ खात पडला आहे, so Atul you should check if you want to use it at Shirwal.

But he has not given up efforts to make pumps diesel free. After spending (wasting?) a lot of time with “experts” on data collection he has now done some solar installation himself on one pond as an experiment. He says once it is successful he will ask for funding to replicate it on all ponds.

He has also asked help from volunteers with 1) app develpment for data entry (a bottleneck for his super efficient efforts on tree mapping ) and 2) a couple of days to be spent by volunteers to aid his plotting exercise. His team is not able to match his son’s pace.  I plan to meet his son at onsite  during his Diwali vacation.

Pooja Castings Visit to Peth, 8-Sep-24

We started from home at 0630 hrs. Sanjeev was supposed to join – but couldn’t as he slept late. Breakfast was at Sairaj Mangal karyalay on the old Rajgurunagar Ghat. Yours Truly and better half reached by 0745 hrs and the Pooja team came in around 8:15 hours. The caterer came in a rickshaw getting the breakfast and utensils along. Mediocre poha and no comments about the chai, as I was on chai detox. (Wait for the tox part later in the report.) Do we really need to go to a different venue for breakfast? Now that we have a container storage at Peth, we can have a local caterer coming in and serving at the venue itself. We can help the person invest in cutlery with a soft working capital loan, if required. Since we are going to host a family there soon, we can create additional income for the household by asking them to do the catering!

Did a 5 minute 14 T spiel at the Mangal Karyalay. Sunday is a weekly off for the factory, so most of the staff that come in were maintenance folks, who usually work on holidays. Also the previous night shift operators who had just finished their shift also joined in. Is voluntary participation better? I think most folks enjoyed the trip, if not anything else, as a picnic. So I would agree with Anil Kulkarni, the Pooja Castings Chairman. that having company people experience CSR activity is worth the expense – and so 14 T will need to scale up its hosting capabilities.

Pooja is basically into aluminium castings. They do low pressure gravity castings and also high pressure die castings. Their factory, at Kharabwadi in Chakan, employs more than 600 people. The company portfolio is dominated by auto clients, and that too mostly on the engine side. They have some EV customers and a few non auto customers too. One interesting customer is an alloy wheel manufacturer. Their CSR activity includes a solar pump based irrigation system nearby. Interestingly they also support Deepstambh, the Jalgaon education charity that our friend Sachin Kher partly funds. 

Chatted up with Altaf, the 14 T coordinator at Pooja. Altaf is from a village about 5 km from Satara town. His dad worked in a Mumbai textile mill, though Altaf and siblings continued to stay at Satara. His brother works in a private company in Pune. Sister’s husband was with the Indian Army and was martyred in Kashmir in 2005 in an RDX explosion. His sister now stays at Satara in the family home. Altaf stays at Chikhli. He has one daughter who is in grade 4. Wife is a homemaker. Altaf is an MA in sociology followed by a MSW with HR specialisation. He did his internship at Pooja and has stayed put for the last 20 years. 

We reached the Peth site at 9:15 hours. The Peth site is about 7 km from the Mangal karyalay. Takes much less time to reach compared to Vetale, as Peth gayran is just 2 km from the main Nasik road. The site is next to the plastic incineration dump of Peth. Work is going on on a couple of new factories very close to our site. We have planted about 20,000 trees spread across three zones. There is also a lovely lake at the bottom of the valley, though it requires two stage pumping to get water from the lake up to our tree levels. 

Each person from Pooja was tasked with planting two trees. This took about 45 minutes. One kaizen that sprung to mind is to have a bluetooth keyboard and enter the database details and photographs by a 14 T team member right at the time of sapling selection. I can lend my bluetooth keyboard for a month and we can do a trial with the same. Or this can be done by individual planters on their mobile phones and can be sent on WhatsApp to us before they start the plantation work. 

In the itinerary we should arrange for a trek to the lake in the valley. Pinki did go there and found it to be a very enjoyable experience. A little bit of planning deficiency on my part was revealed when not too many people visited the ponds. We need to do all these visits before the tree plantation happens. After that, there was a hurry to leave as there was no lunch planned. They did not even wait for the chai, which was on its way. I broke my rule and had two cups of sweet milky chai to prevent some muda. (That’s a Jap word with an interesting meaning. Do Google it.) Already regret the decision to break my chai fast and vow to do strict non chai penance for the next one month. 

What I liked about the Pooja team is their concern for the operators. Like most other medium scale enterprises, Pooja hires labour through contractors, many of whom are ex employees of the company. What is interesting is that many contractual operators have been with Pooja for more than 5 years. Normally tenures of more than 6 months are legally challenging, but the contractors have discovered some jugaad to ensure this. Currently, attrition at operator level is about 10 to 12%. It takes Pooja almost 1 year to train an operator. So Altaf and company are worried about this high attrition rate. Target is to get it down to 5%. Altaf and company keep an eye open for talent transition. Pooja has a culture of identifying talent at operator level and grooming them into staff positions. One of the senior marketing persons started his career serving tea at the canteen. 2 security guards now work in production planning. Most contract workers are from UP, Bengal and Odisha. The company is working on subsidising housing so that they can get their families to stay in Pune. 

We had a short question and answer at the end. 

• Most plantations are happening on slopes. Will water be retained in such a case? 
• Do you guys use fertiliser?
• What trees have the best survival rate?

I exhorted people who had come to finish off their 14 trees quota. 2 done. 12 more to go. At the rate of one every 2 years, it should get done in 25 years! I asked them to plant their third one in a location which is easily accessible to them and where they can nurture the tree. Have also asked them to come back after 3 years and do the kanyadan of their twin daughters who they had just planted into the wombs of mother Earth!

Pinki and I stayed back at the site after the Pooja team left. We were soon joined by Anant’s team members, who had come down from Vetale to update the tree dashboard.  6 people will work 2 days to finish this exercise. I wonder if you can just click photographs and let artificial intelligence do the job of identifying the tree ‘s ID l, type and location. I did a small experiment – used Google Lens to digitise their handwritten data. Not perfect – but it can be refined further using some AI stuff. Sample output attached at the end of the report. 

Even after all the automation, data entry will still require a 2 person team, but productivity will definitely increase. On a divergent thought, working with a buddy is a great idea – even for volunteers! It helps in two ways: Keeps morale high; ensures work quality. The latter is because of the maker-checker principle! If any of you are interested in the buddy system, I am ready to be a guinea pig! We had tried to cajole our local 24T contact if we could use a local tiffin service, but were unsuccessful in our efforts. We ended up having a very avoidable lunch at Hotel Balaji – next time, we will try Hotel Sahyadri, which is 0.5 km further down the road.

Appendix

Google Lens and Google Translate conversion of handwritten Marathi data to Engish text.

12.9753- DOM

129/97-

129198

127820-Khar

157320-many

157319-many

127814-Khar

127843 -Tamarind

127831 – Well

129195 – Putrajeeva

129722-Mango

189723-Mango

129724-shell

129725-Bhoba

157341 -many

129726-month

129727-Mango

157343-cotton