The RM Tulpule Charitable Trust has provided funding to the 14trees foundation (https://14trees.org/) in April 2022 for one acre of barren land to be converted into a forest which would contain approximately 330 native trees. The foundation under the stewardship of Pravin Bhagwat, its chairman, has been actively working on the reforestation concept and execution of this methodology for the last 7 years. They have received support and sponsorship from many organizations, including IIT Kanpur Alumni, and currently have 300 acres of land with 60,000+ native trees and 64 rainwater harvesting ponds.

The central concept behind “14trees” is that, based on their estimates, it takes about 14 trees to absorb the amount of CO2 that a typical person exhales in a lifetime. Some of the other key elements of this concept are

1. Selection of native trees, which require longer period to mature, with the help of The Ecological Society and planting them on barren land, and managing them to be sustainable in the long run.
2. Creation rainwater harvesting ponds thereby avoid use of piped-in water and helping to raise the groundwater level for long term sustainability.
3. Protection of plants for three years with regular watering and protecting them from grazing animals.
4. Association of each planted tree with the local people who planted it in order to greatly increase the survival of the tree.
5. Deployment of cloud hosted IT system and a dashboard to monitor progress and tracking of assets.
6. Creation of Rural entrepreneurship and jobs for the local rural population which helps maintain the data base and participate in the management of the forest.

The pictures below illustrate these key concepts. A more detailed background and concepts behind the 14trees foundation can be found in (14trees Project background Information.doc).