Kapil Sharma

Co-founder

Co-founder of SayTrees

Kapil Sharma is the co-founder of SayTrees (2007)[1], an Indian non-profit working on environment from Bengaluru.

Kapil Sharma is an Indian software engineer who founded SayTrees, an environmental organisation based in Bengaluru that plants and maintains trees, creates urban forests and restores lakes and other water bodies.

He began planting saplings near his home and workplace in Bengaluru in 2007, concerned at the loss of the city's tree cover to road-widening and construction, and started SayTrees in the same year. The group was registered as a trust in 2013 and has since worked in a number of Indian states.

Early life and education

Sharma is from Chhattisgarh. He studied at the Dr Ambedkar Institute of Technology in Bengaluru and has said that seeing trees felled in the city during his student years prompted him to act. He has continued to work as a software engineer alongside running SayTrees.

Career

SayTrees began as weekend tree-planting by Sharma alone and grew as volunteers joined him, among them Sumant Parmar, Durgesh Agrahari and Avineet Prakash. The group identifies planting sites, obtains the necessary permissions, organises plantation drives with volunteers and corporate groups, and maintains the saplings afterwards; by early 2016 it had planted more than 35,000 saplings in Bengaluru.

The organisation's work later widened to agroforestry with farmers, urban forests planted by the Miyawaki method, lake and water-body restoration and clean energy, and extended to Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi and rural areas in several states. It reports having planted several million trees and rejuvenated a number of lakes in Bengaluru and Pune.

Recognition

SayTrees was named a top innovator in the Trillion Trees Challenge run on the World Economic Forum's UpLink platform, and Sharma received an Indian Achievers Award in 2022.[2][3][4][5]

SayTrees

SayTrees mobilises volunteers and corporates to plant trees, create urban forests and restore lakes and water bodies. It focuses on large-scale afforestation and environmental restoration.

SayTrees reports the following, on its own site: