1,08,945 saplings in a pandemic year

No tent, no stage, no crowd: the distribution camps of 2020 looked nothing like the ones before them. Farmers sat spaced out on the ground in school compounds and village greens, masks on, with their sapling packets beside them, while volunteers kept the programme short.

With funds from individual donors and camps organised by Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, the 2020–21 drive reached 11,917 families in Mathura and Sonbhadra districts with 1,08,945 fruit saplings — Amrapali mango, grafted jackfruit, guava and lemon, pomegranate, desi jamun, neem, pakad and karonda — over ten months. It was, and remains, the largest number of saplings the campaign has distributed in a single year.

On 26 September 2020 the women of one village carried their saplings home in the way the campaign hopes for: one packet, one courtyard, one more family with fruit trees of its own.