Bharat Sisodia and his inspiring work with Miyawaki ‘plantanence’ at the Catch Foundation!

The CATCH Foundation works on three different societal problems and provides solutions for them.  

• The first is waste segregation under the S.M.A.R.T Family (Segregating Managing And Recycling Task) initiative. They work on creating awareness of why waste segregation is important and how it can be done. For people who have never segregated waste before, Bharat and his team explain the value of dry and wet waste. So far, they have saved more than 150 tons of dry waste from going to landfills and have helped increase income of waste workers by INR  5000/6000 per month by showing them that they can collect and sell the segregated dry waste. Bharat admits that it takes some time to break old habits through education of waste segregation but is always effective through conversation and raising awareness. As of today, more than 15,000 families have joined them on this mission.
• Their second initiative is the ‘Say no to single-use plastic’ movement. They talked to people around them and identified the most common use of single-use plastic bags to be at the vegetable markets. To provide a solution for that, they brainstormed with their volunteers and tied up with a company to create what they call a Smart Bag – a reusable bag with 5 different pockets inside it so people can go to the vegetable market, buy 8-10 kgs of vegetables and keep them separate in the bag, thus saving them time when they get home and unload the vegetables. To date, over 24000 such bags have been distributed, reducing countless single-use plastic bags from being used. The CATCH Foundation involved school going children and educated them about single-use plastic bags, went door-to-door talking to people, showing them how each person can reduce the use of 5 plastic bags everyday through the use of the Smart Bag. An interesting way that they devised to give the bags out was to set up stalls in vegetable markets and ask people to bring them all their plastic waste from home. People started to bring them kilos and kilos of their plastic waste instead of throwing it in landfills and the CATCH Foundation would give them a bag in exchange. This way, they slowly started to change people’s behaviour towards single-use plastic bags.
• Their third initiative is called Plantanence, plantation + maintenance of trees. The CATCH Foundation has planted more than 3,00,000 trees so far, inspired by the Miyawaki method and created more than 75 urban dense forests with a survival ratio of more than 90% and a 10 times higher growth rate than normal. Their Land Procurement team acquires garden land from authorities like the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, Gandhinagar Municipal Corporation, Urban Development Authority, and various universities and hospitals. The Foundation focuses on planting diverse species,  4 trees in one square metre, leading to a healthy symbiotic relationship between the trees and creating biodiversity of birds and animals. At the time of the interview, Bharat was sitting in the middle of one of his dense forests,  planted only 3.5 years back, with trees already grown to a robust 25-30 feet height! They are fully committed to maintenance of these trees and raise funds for the same in a variety of ways – corporate sponsorship, adopt-a-tree schemes and selling saplings at their own nurseries. The CATCH foundation has an entirely online, transparent system that helps you track an adopted tree, providing information like its location and the care given to the tree. They pride themselves on having created ‘oxygen paths’ within the dense forests for people to walk through and energize themselves!