This software engineer from Chhattisgarh is making Bengaluru green, 35,000 trees and counting

Kapil Sharma, a software professional from Chattisgarh, moved to Bengaluru about 11 years ago and was shocked at the rate the city’s green cover was vanishing. Kapil soon started planting trees across the city during weekends. Fast forward nine years, and he has planted over 35,000 saplings all over Bengaluru. He has also co-founded an NGO called SayTrees, dedicated to saving the environment and make the city greener by taking the message to different schools, institutions, villages, and communities.

Kapil still remembers his early days in Bengaluru, when he was deeply disturbed by the green cover forced to give way to a concrete jungle. “By 2007, I could see drastic changes in the city’s climatic conditions, due to rampant felling of trees. I wanted to do something but didn’t know where to begin. After several meetings with BBMP officials, I identified places where I could plant saplings,” Kapil told The Times of India.

Having grown from an individual to a volunteer-based initiative, there is today an active community that takes special care of maintaining the saplings they plant, ensuring that the survival rate of these saplings is over 80 percent. Kapil, in an interview with The Better India, said, “We want to encourage more schools and corporates to engage in such drives. Especially corporates, since it also serves their purpose of engaging in CSR activities and helps us easily get funds to buy saplings.”

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