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Digging in for a green future

After doing nine hours of night shift, 90 BPO employees from the city travelled to Nelamangala to plant saplings

-- This is an article that is published in Bangalore Mirror.
http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Repository/ml.asp?Ref=QkdNSVIvMjAwOS8wNy8xMiNBcjAwNTAw&Mode=HTML&Locale=english-skin-custom

BPO employees are sometimes maligned as spendthrift youngsters who get too much too soon. Some people see them as 20-somethings zipping around the town in cabs to swanky offices at odd hours of the day and night, spending their weekends in merrymaking.

They would have changed their opinion if they had seen what happened on Saturday morning. After finishing their night shift, 90 BPO employees left the plush air conditioned offices of Aditya Birla MINACS near the Outer Ring Road and travelled to Nelamangala.






By afternoon, they had managed to plant over 200 saplings in the fields of Vishwa Shanthi Ashram.

Each group took about half an hour to plant a sapling against the 10 minutes a seasoned hand would have taken. But not a bad effort considering that they are people who rarely step out to work with their hands.




The employees were carrying spades and getting their hands dirty, egging each other on. “Tum jaise khod rahi ho, shaam ho jayega!” “Must it be 2 feet? There are no rules, yaar!” “Use the crowbar da.” “Yeh to new age farmer lag raha hai” were the quips flying. Most of them were sweating and some chose to go shirtless.

One employee said, “This is not tough, I come from an agricultural background.” Another one added, “It is a pleasure, we hardly ever get to do this sort of work.”

The first group to plant a sapling of “peepal” named their plant “Minpal”.

SITES SCARCE

But why plant saplings so far from the city? “I spoke to many people about land for planting the saplings. At Vishwa Shanti Ashram, the people told me they would provide land for the saplings and look after them,” said Dheeraj Kumar M, a software engineer.

He got the saplings for free from the Isha Foundation’s Project GreenHands, which seeks to reverse environmental degradation and enable sustainable living. Banking extensively on people’s participation, the foundation is aiming to plant 114 million trees state-wide by the year 2010.


Of the 500 saplings ready to be planted, there were 250 Hoo Arasu plants while the rest were kumulu, Flame of the Forest, Singapore Cherry and Saracca Indica saplings.

Rajesh, co-ordinator of Project GreenHands, said the project planted 14,000 saplings in Bangalore last year. This year, it targets to plant 3,000 saplings within the city and on the outskirts