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Shubhendu Sharma left his high-paying job as an engineer to plant trees for the rest of his life. Using the unique Miyawaki methodology to grow forests, Afforestt converts any land into a self-sustainable forest in a couple of years.
The Unesco Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP) launched #VirtualGandhiMarch, a social media campaign to mobilise youth to share their kindness stories, on August 12.

People who change the world aren’t always who you expect. Sometimes, they’re just ordinary people who believe in a better world and have the drive and undying spirit to achieve their goals. These are the stories of a handful of such people from across the country whose innovative ideas and determination are making a difference in their respective communities.
In the run-up to the event, CNBC-TV18 is publishing a series of inspiring stories of people who are the trailblazers of social change. Below is the fourth story in the series:
Project Afforestt – creating self-sustainable forest
Name – Shubhendu Sharma
Gender- Male
Place – Bengaluru, India
Shubhendu Sharma left his high-paying job as an engineer to plant trees for the rest of his life. Using the unique Miyawaki methodology to grow forests, Afforestt converts any land into a self-sustainable forest in a couple of years. It all started when Sharma volunteered to assist a naturalist, Dr. Akira Miyawaki to plant a forest at the Toyota plant where he worked. Sharma started to experiment with the model and came up with an Indian version after slight modifications using soil amenders. His first attempt with making forests was in his own backyard in Uttarakhand, where he grew a lush green forest within a year’s time. This gave him confidence and he decided to launch it as a full-time initiative. He quit his job and spent almost a year to do research on the methodology.

Sharma started Afforestt, a company dedicated to creating natural, wild, maintenance-free, native forests in 2011. Afforestt promotes a standardised method for seeding dense, fast-growing, native forests in barren lands, using his car-manufacturing experience to create a system allowing a multilayer forest of 300 trees to grow on an area as small as the parking spaces of six cars -- for less than the price of an iPhone. Convincing the family that this was the next step was very tough. They could not understand why he was bent on quitting a high-paying engineering job to plant trees all his life. Sharma, now has a team of 15 that works from Bangalore and Delhi and have created many such forests.

Follow the #KindnessMatters series here.
First Published: Aug 20, 2019 2:50 PM IST
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