Exhausted by the overbearing grey concrete that is creeping up on Mumbai like some futuristic horror film, a growing number of people have decided to do their bit to cultivate little green utopias, sometimes as rebel gardeners.
These 'guerilla gardeners' range from a dentist who seed-bombs forests near Mumbai to a yoga instructor who surreptitiously plants saplings wherever she can find a free spot in her neighbourhood. Their small interventions are reminiscent of the Guerrila Gardening movement that was started in London some years ago, where ordinary citizens roamed around identifying abandoned spaces and cultivating them when no one was looking.
Dentist Dr Firdaus Batiwala gets active just before the monsoon. "We fly a fourseater aircraft over a 200-mile radius outside Mumbai and scatter seeds over areas that we can see are deforested or strip-mined," says Batiwala, who has encouraged other members of the Bombay Flying Club to do the same.
While seed-bombing works best outside the city, guerrilla gardeners working within Mumbai take a different route.
Read more of this voluntary effort to take care of the environment in a report by Namita Devidayal published in The Times of India....
Such volutnary efforts can easily be replicated elsewhere to change the green cover of that particular area leading to more greenery in the country.
