Part of our tree library. As part of better understanding our environment, the children have identified all the different trees the can find in our school (more than 50!) and labelled them in English, Hindi and the local language.

In June 2008, toward the end of the first ever school year at Hunar Ghar, Deepak went off to the government forestry department to try to get some small saplings to be planted during the monsoon at Hunar Ghar.

He returned with 2 pick-up trucks worth of plants for Hunar Ghar and the community and a lot of fruiting and flowering trees were distributed around the community. Though we haven’t scaled-up from this experience in a formal sense, there has been a small but noticeable shift toward community members planting a few trees each year, which they will nurture and protect; a process that we support them in by distributing saplings and placing value on reforestation and environmental stewardship.

We have been told that the area we work in used to be forest land. Now there is less than 10% tree cover in the area and this is concentrated in the hill-areas. It’s difficult to place responsibility on the community for this process of deforestation, as it is symptomatic of fuel poverty, a lack of access to alternative building materials & economic poverty.

However, slowly but surely, we’re making progress toward shifting community perceptions about the value of tree cover, with sapling distribution and community members now planting and nurturing a few trees each year. Over time we’d hope to expand this work and integrate it with changes in farming methods and some watershed development work as a reflection of our integrated approach to development.