Protecting India's green

Bidadi: The company that had partnered with NDTV in March to create the Greenathon, India's first 24-hour programme on the environment, is still thinking green. Toyota Kirloskar Motors launched a massive tree-planting drive, but with a difference.

Six-year-old Varun is working hard on a holiday. So is little Aryan. Tough job after all, to create a forest out of plain land, as Toyota Kirloskar Motors has set out to do, on the outskirts of Bangalore at their campus in Bidadi. Part of a 6,000-plus crowd that planted 30,000 saplings on Sunday, Aryan is thrilled with the results.

When asked as to how many trees he planted, Aryan replied excitedly, "Eight!"

Mango, neem, banyan, 51 native species were chosen. For that was the advice given by renowned Japanese ecologist Dr Miyawaki to Toyota when the company sought his advice.

"Only the real native vegetation has sustained the typhoons, the natural disasters like fire, tsunami etc. If we put exotic species, they grow very fast, but they also die very fast," said Dr Akira Miyawaki, Director, Japanese centre for International Studies in Ecology.
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"We have been planting trees all over the place but the way we are doing it this time is creating a natural forest inside, not a laid out tree plantation," said Vikram Kirloskar‬‪, Toyota Kirloskar Motors.

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Thanks to thousands of people at work on a Sunday, the land behind me will be a sustainable forest a few years down the line. A clean, green example of how a company can stay right at the top and yet do fabulous things for environment and the earth.

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