Start Planting

Our Story: Planting for Change

Restoring land. Rebuilding communities. Planting for Change. These phrases are the foundation of Sustainable Green Initiative (SGI). More than slogans, they are the unspoken contract between people, land, and a planted future.

How It All Began

SGI’s journey started with a moment of reckoning for its founder, Mr. Raj Mohan. After years of publishing the Yellow Pages— a business built on countless sheets of paper—he felt a moral weight: he owed a debt to the trees that gave him his livelihood.

The first act of restoration unfolded in Chamoli, Uttarakhand. Working with a women’s Self-Help Group, SGI planted one thousand apple saplings. This small beginning grew into a sixty-million-tree movement, guided by a core truth: trees restore land, but communities restore life.

A Growing Impact Across India

From the mountains, SGI’s “Urban Greening” project actively involves children and elders in planting saplings within schools, parks, and old-age homes throughout India’s major cities. Concurrently, in the extensive farmlands of Haryana and Northern Uttar Pradesh, SGI introduced “Agroforestry in the North” as a sustainable solution to help farmers restore their sense of dignity, diversify their incomes, and stabilize their agricultural livelihoods.

Protecting the Coast:
The Sundarbans

The Sundarbans, a landscape defined by cyclones and tidal floods, changed the scale of SGI’s work. SGI recognized that mangroves were a necessity for survival.

With local community support, SGI planted more than twenty million mangroves, creating vital green fortresses that buffer villages from the worst of the storms. They also introduced the agroforestry models now adapted to the harsh, saline coastal climate, providing stable livelihoods.

Forests on Moving Land:
The Brahmaputra

In Assam, SGI took on the challenge of creating forests on the sandbars constantly shaped by the Brahmaputra River. We partnered with Sri Jadab Payeng—the legendary Forest Man of India—and the Mising community. Beside Payeng’s Molai Forest, SGI established new plantations that have attracted diverse wildlife, including wild buffalo, elephants, rhinos, and even tigers.

The Heart of the Movement: Sonbhadra & Mirzapur

Among all the landscapes SGI serves, none is more central to our identity than Sonbhadra and Mirzapur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh. This region of rain-scarred plateaus and mining zones revealed both the fragility and the extraordinary resilience of small farmers struggling with depleted soils, water scarcity, and debt.

SGI arrived here with humility and a commitment to long-term agroforestry: tree-based farming systems that restore the soil, stabilize water cycles, and diversify income.

Our Community-Driven Approach

  • Species Selection: We introduced carefully selected fruit-timber combinations, such as mango, guava, lemon, and valuable long-term species like teak, rosewood, and mahogany.
  • Empowering Women & Youth: Women became the backbone of our nursery production near Mirzapur. Local youth were trained in monitoring survival rates and water management.
  • Immediate Results: Elder farmers, initially hesitant, quickly reported visible improvements: cooler soils, improved moisture retention, better fodder supply, and essential early cash flow from intercropped vegetables, cereals, and pulses.