Building a forest one tree at a time

BANGALORE: Give them a piece of land - barren, slushy or even rocky - and ask them to develop a small forest. And after a couple of years, take a stroll through a neatly planned natural forest, with small and big trees sheltering birds and other small animals.
Bangalore, once considered one of the greenest in India, is turning into a concrete jungle.But Afforestt, an organization that specializes in designing urban forests, is trying to change that. Afforestt has a well-qualified team of professionals such as environmental engineers, bio-diversity experts and architects, and they undertake projects to create natural, wild, maintenance-free, native forests in Bangalore at the lowest possible costs.
Afforestt was started in 2011 by a young engineer from Uttarakhand, Shubhendu Sharma. "I was working as an engineer at Toyota. At the Toyota factory in Bidadi, I saw a small forest developed by Dr Akira Miyawaki, a scientist from Yokohoma, Japan. I came to know that he had planted 4 crore trees in 1,700 sites across the world. In India, he has planted over 2.5 lakh plants as part of afforestation projects. I was inspired by his mission and quit my job to start Afforestt in 2011," says Sharma.
In 2014, Sharma was chosen to become a TED fellow (TED: Ideas worth spreading is a non-profit ideas platform, and stands for Technology. Entertainment. Design), and he spoke at the TED conference in Vancouver this year about whether afforestation can save the planet from the negative fallouts deforestation.
Sharma has also attended the INK conference in 2013 and spoke about how he imagines a future where plucking a fruit from a tree will be easier than buying it at a supermarket. As a rule, the organisation plants only native trees as they believe exotic trees may not be able to survive or dominate, and may cause unforeseen damages to native flora and fauna.
Today, Afforestt can boast of developing forests at many locations in Bangalore, including at a private residence in Whitefield, at Adugodi police station, a farm house on Kanakapura road and a factory in Peenya.
"The first thing that comes to our mind when we see a piece of land is how to design the forest, as we have to plant several species of saplings keeping in mind the height, distance between them and the nature of the soil. So to make our work easy, we have developed a software called Heijunka, to optimise the resources and vertical space for the forest. Heijunka is a Japanese word," says Sharma. Many of the forest design methodologies used by the team have been inspired by Japanese techniques.
Stating an example of a house in Jigani where Afforestt has developed a forest measuring 1,600 sq feet on 2,800 sq feet of land, Sharma says, "The designing of the forest begins with the survey of the soil, use of local biomass and later identifying plant species for a particular land. The biomass is mixed with the soil. Then we form soil mounds to avoid water stagnation before planting saplings."
A feature of Afforestt designs are that they prefer multi-layered saplings. It includes a shrub layer (which grows up to 6 ft), sub-tree layer (6 ft-20 ft), tree layer (20 ft-40 ft) and canopy layer ( above 40 ft). "The rule that we follow is that we plant three saplings per sq metre with a gap of 1 ft to 1.5 ft between saplings," explains Sharma.
Follow-up action forms an important part in forest design. "We measure 10 trees for every 300 trees we plant every month. We monitor the actual growth rate against the target growth rate, which is one metre per year. We water the saplings on alternate days, de-weed the site once a week and measure the plant once a month
for its growth," says Sharma.
Afforestt designs four types of forests - fruit forests; forests for aesthetics; farm forests (nuts, fruits etc) and wild forests (big trees) depending on the land. "Our ultimate mission is to make Bangalore an environment-friendly city," says Sharma. ​