Piplantri · India

There are communities that focus on seeing where their problems become entangled and, instead of treating them separately, they work right there to untangle them.

In the Rajasthan desert of India, for example, a village called Piplantri has transformed greatly thanks to following this approach.

A few years ago, its region was heavily affected by marble mining. The mining companies employed almost the entire village, but they also were dumping their waste stones on people's land, and nature stopped growing on it. Without plants, water had no way to rise to the surface and it filtered so deep that it reached more than 240 meters deep, too deep for people to reach. The village was left without water to drink and without land to sow.

Furthermore, in many communities in that area, since living off the land is already difficult and money is scarce, many prefer to have sons to support the family, especially when parents age, because when girls marry — almost always very young — they leave their home to take care of their husband's family's house. Therefore, if a family can barely send any of their children to school, they usually choose to send the boys, and thus many women don't get the chance to study and, once married, are almost never allowed to work outside the home, making them completely dependent on others.

All of this was happening in Piplantri until 2005, when the people elected Shyam Sundar Paliwal as village head, and he began to tackle all these problems together through connected strategies:

1. They first fixed basic conditions so land could recover and water return

He built schools, improved the sanitation system, and to recover water and plant trees, he revoked the mining companies' permission to use communal lands for dumping waste, laid pipes, and installed a pump that works with a merry-go-round where every time children climb on to play, it pumps fresh water! He also designed a drip irrigation system to begin reforestation.

2. They created a new tradition: every girl born would be received with support and affection

Paliwal ji suffered the great sorrow of losing his daughter, and while planting a tree in her memory, he thought it would be beautiful if all families in the village celebrated their daughters' lives. To make it happen, he invited Kala — a woman much loved by the community — to visit the village houses to propose an idea that initially puzzled many: to welcome every newborn girl with the support and affection of the entire community.

The proposal would work like this:

• Each year they would hold a ceremony for the girls born in the village where, along with their families, they would plant a tree in honor of each one. And they, furthermore, committed to planting another 110 trees per girl (111 in total) throughout the year.

• At the same time, if the family committed to putting up 10,000 rupees from their own pocket (approx. 100 USD), they would organize a collection on the day of the ceremony to ask the community to give what they could and wanted to raise another 21,000 rupees (approx. 200 USD). All that money would be placed in a bank account in the girl's name, and no one could touch it until she came of age (thus earning interest in the meantime). If they failed to raise the 21,000 rupees in the collection, they committed to finding a way to complete it with outside support.

• In return, families had to sign a written commitment (an affidavit) to send the girl to school, not marry her before the legal age, not practice female feticide, and help care for the trees until they were mature and bore fruit.

Little by little, they managed to convince many families, and in 2007 they began planting the trees. Since about 5,500 people live in Piplantri and around 60 girls are born each year, trees multiplied very quickly and results began to show.

They have not only reforested more than 1,000 hectares with over 350,000 trees of many species: annatto, mango, gooseberry, sandalwood, neem, bamboo, and aloe vera. The trees have helped bring water within people's reach, moisten the land, make it fertile again, allow sowing to resume, and little by little bring back animals and plants.

Furthermore, with the support for girls (more than 3,000 to date), they began attending school. Thus, within a few years, 100% of the girls in Piplantri knew how to read and write.

3. They also created new ways for women (and men too!) to earn a living

To be able to plant the trees they agreed upon with each family, Paliwal ji, Kala, and their team secured funding from the central government to pay village women to do it. That, in itself, was a great challenge, because women were not allowed to work outside the home since their responsibility was to care for their household, and going out to work was frowned upon. But this job was within the village and was flexible (it allowed them to organize it with their other tasks), so little by little, seeing that those who tried were bringing a little money home, more families allowed their women to participate.

But that was just the beginning.

When the women planting the trees noticed that termites were eating them, they decided to plant aloe vera around them for protection, and before they knew it, these plants had grown incredibly fast, and they had a huge amount. So they saw an opportunity and started making aloe vera products to sell (juices, creams, etc.)! All of this earned the project a well-deserved award from the government (the Nirmal Gram Panchayat Award), which they used to buy more machines and grow their production. Unfortunately, with the pandemic, the machines sat idle for so long that they broke down, and the aloe business had to be paused. (Want to support? Click here!).

But the project continues to seek new paths.

Lately, they have been exploring tourism, because since they became known for all their achievements, many people from around the world started visiting them (they get about 200 visitors per month!): they began building lodging cabins with funding they secured from the government, organized themselves to sell food to those who come for walks, and plan to build viewpoints, observation towers, and stages to organize local cultural shows. All these new jobs are encouraging many people to continue caring for the new forest and are allowing the local economy to become less and less dependent on the mining companies.

4. They organized the project for the long term

In 2014 they decided to create a civil organization (NGO) called Kiran Nidhi Sansthan to:

• ensure that everything they had achieved did not depend solely on Paliwal ji being the village head, nor on the current political party in the local government supporting the project.

• secure more donations — to complete the girls' funds when community collections fall short of 21,000 rupees, to pay the gardeners, etc. They have secured support from mining companies, international organizations, and people from all over who have heard their story. Today, on their website, they also publish several options for anyone to support them: donating money to plant a tree, to educate a girl for one year, or to provide clean water to a family.

• take advantage of other types of support, such as registering in the carbon credit market, through which starting this year they will be paid for every tree they have planted that is between 3 and 25 years old.

It doesn't get more holistic than this! The forest itself has become a source of income to continue caring for it, for the project, and for the community. And all because one day, in a small village in Rajasthan, a group of people decided that instead of addressing one or another of their problems separately, they would work right where they intersect. The girls, the trees, the water, the school, women's employment, the future of the community… everything was tangled. And by working at that intersection, how much they have untangled!

In 2021, Paliwal ji received the Padma Shri, one of the most important awards given by the Indian government, recognizing him as 'the father of ecofeminism' for uniting the defense of girls with the care of nature.

The project has motivated so many positive changes that the government of the state of Rajasthan decided to use it as an example for other villages! To that end, they built a huge building in the village where people from Piplantri gives courses on their model, which are now mandatory for everyone who wins authority positions throughout the state!

To date, more than 147 villages in northern India have adopted the Piplantri model!