A CrowdFunded Forest

A while ago, in some inspired moment, the thought about creating a crowd-sourced forest occurred. And nearly 10 years after that, it sprung again and this time I actually took a small step towards it (thanks in part to the confidence gained doing Beforest).

But It Needs A LOT Of Help

Got a lot of immediate response, reshares and many pledged 25000 for this. (Will create a trust and ask for the money once we hit a 1cr number — will explain why in a bit)

What Is The PLAN?

There’s 45 acre place at the fringes of the Bandipur forest identified for this. It is a piece of private land between the forest and a huge lake which is the only source of water for the animals around in the summer. Buying out, protecting this land, and growing back a forest on it will help create a corridor to the lake. It also adds 45 acres to the forest and thousands of trees to our ecosystem — think of these as core infrastructure for our lungs, for our soils and for our water cycles.

We’ll work with the forest department for protecting and monitoring the land. But will keep the ownership in a trust created explicitly for this purpose — we believe that protects the forest longer term than even leaving it with the government, or doing this effort on government land.

We’ll keep the ownership in a trust (seeking legal opinion on making this both transparent and bullet proof).

All this costs MONEY :/

The land itself will be around 3 crores (fair market value for the current owner). The owner’s been nice and is ok doing this in tranches, with the first third being the 1st one — so we get about 15 acres for about a crore.

This becomes out FIRST HURDLE.

About 35L is pledged at this point. Unless we can get to 1cr, this is a non-starter.

Here’s the sheet with pledges (to add, please leave a comment in a new row — I’ll add) : http://bit.ly/CrowdForest

Do pitch in, do spread the word and help reach this number so this can take off. This needs a LOT of folks donating a mere 25k (more is always welcome) towards this.

We need to demonstrate to the government, and to citizens, the value of growing forests as infra that’s as critical as highways and train systems are.

Will we find enough support and help? Fingers crossed.