'As many as it takes': Peepal Baba's half-century mission to reforest India

WITH Delhi's choking haze hanging overhead, Peepal Baba presses a young tree into the earth, continuing a nearly half-century mission to restore India's vanishing green cover.

"When I was young, I planted saplings like a soldier," said Swami Prem Parivartan, better known as "Peepal Baba", or "tree father", rubbing earth between his fingers and mixing wet mulch around the sapling's base.

It is the latest tree among millions that his teams estimate to have planted.

"What started as a solitary act of planting became contagious," he said.

At 60, he has turned a childhood fascination with trees into one of India's largest grassroots planting movements.

"We did not wait for governments to act," he said. "We gathered friends, volunteers, wanderers, believers."

In Delhi, a sprawling megacity of 30 million people with scorching summers and toxic winter air, his answer to environmental despair is stubbornly simple — plant a tree, keep it alive, then plant another.

"Whatever little we can do for the environment, we have to do," he said, beaming a warm smile.

Exactly how many trees he has planted, and how much land has been restored, are not his focus.

His trust estimates it has restored vegetation across more than 270,000ha, or 2,700 sq km — more than twice the size of Delhi and nearly as large as California's Yosemite National Park.

The organisation says it has planted or preserved 26 million trees.

But he insists numbers and exact areas are not the point.

"I never counted shade in digits," he said. "It is not about planting one tree or two trees or 1,000 trees. It's about how you manage the land on which those plants have been planted."

His fascination with trees was nurtured by his grandmother and a garden he loved tending.

He planted his first trees on his 11th birthday, including a peepal, or Ficus religiosa, a tree with vast spreading roots, sacred to several of India's religions.

Peepal trees have provided shade for village meetings, temples, tea stalls and markets for centuries.

He calls them "cooling towers of human hope" in his 2026 autobiography.

He put aside a career in academia after university.

Instead, he set off across India by scooter to encourage people to grow trees — and his nickname came from a villager he met while planting.

"Peepal Baba", he decided, carried more authority than "environmentalist", which he regarded as a foreign-sounding word at the time.

"My nickname travelled faster than my scooter," he writes.

That scooter carried him across India multiple times.

From his notebooks, he estimates he travelled nearly 540,000km — enough to circle the Earth more than 13 times.

He slept wherever he found shelter —in temples, homes, bus shelters or beneath a peepal tree.

Long sustained by individual and community donations, the trust has in recent years also brought on major corporate donors to expand its work.

With more than 1.6 million Instagram followers, he now also spreads his message through social media and a growing network of volunteers in the field.

His philosophy has expanded from planting trees to restoring the soil that sustains them.

"Every civilisation that respected its soil prospered; everyone that ignored it perished," he said.

"We've built skyscrapers tall enough to touch clouds, but forgotten how to kneel and touch the soil."

For him, the task remains simple: plant a tree, care for it and make sure it survives.

"When people ask, 'How many?', I answer, 'As many as it takes to give the Earth a second chance'."

The writer is from AFP