BIKANER: A unique forestry technique involving schoolchildren and their families is proving effective in tree plantation in Bikaner and Ganganagar districts. Interestingly, the technique is not a brainchild of any forest official or an expert but is conceived and developed by a young college lecturer Shyam Sunder Jyani. Jyani calls his technique Familial Forestry' in which the saplings are planted by students inside the house boundaries and the survival and growth of the plants are monitored by their schoolteachers.
Jyani started this concept in 2006 when he was a programme officer of National Service Scheme (NSS). He had planted saplings in 120 houses of Himtasar village located about 15 kms from the district headquarters of Bikaner. The village households were divided into two part; 60 households were told about the benefits of trees and were included in the after plantation care' of village teachers.
Jyani said survival rate of saplings in the inspired families were an astonishing 90% while the other 60 households had only 20-30%. Jyani and his NSS volunteers also planted trees in campuses of scout- guide training center in Sagar village and department of science and technology, Bikaner, with high success ratio. In 2007, a mass plantation drive was taken up in Gajsukhdesar village about 100 kms from Bikaner. A team of 1,500 volunteers, schoolchildren and villagers planted 1,05,000 saplings in and around the village. Later, Jyani found that only those saplings survived which were inside the houses of villagers.
This year Jyani took up his passion to a higher level and visited scores of villages of Ganganagar district for his plantation drive. The Harit Rajasthan campaign by chief minister Ashok Gehlot government gave reasons for the district administration of Ganganagar to associate with Jyani's concept.
From September 10 to October 5, this year, 2,93,000 saplings were planted in 1,00,291 households of 2,086 villages of Ganganagar district under National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (NREG). Under the green project, one teacher from each of the 2,241 government schools were made task leaders and were given necessary training. These leaders visited the households of the students (the village houses normally have good open spaces) and selected the site and asked about the preferred plant variety from the family. These task leaders would now keep a close track on the growth of the trees for next two years. Interestingly, 1,75,000 of these saplings are fruit yielding like kinnu, pomegranate, amla and jamun.