When Africa plants, India should think bigger

There is an old saying in our neighbourhood. The moment one family paints its house or buys a new car, Sharma Aunty peers over the balcony and asks, “If they can do it, why can’t we?” Nations, too, could occasionally benefit from that kind of neighbourhood curiosity.

Africa’s Great Green Wall has once again drawn global attention. It stretches roughly 8,000 kilometres across the Sahel, from Senegal to Djibouti. But despite its poetic name, it is not simply a wall of trees. It is a continent-wide effort to restore degraded land, improve food security and help communities cope with climate change. More than twenty African nations are part of the initiative, despite funding shortages, security concerns and years of delays.

The obvious question for India is not whether Africa will finish first. It is: What are we doing while our neighbour is planting?

To be fair, India is hardly standing still. Every July, Van Mahotsav reminds us of our deep cultural bond with trees. The festival began in the years after Independence and has encouraged generations of Indians to plant saplings. Governments announce plantation drives. Schools organise events. And millions of saplings are planted across the country.

Yet the uncomfortable truth is that tree planting and landscape restoration are not the same.

A sapling planted for a photo opportunity is not a forest. A plantation of one species is not biodiversity. And counting how many trees were planted tells us little unless we know how many survived five years later.

The real lesson from Africa goes beyond planting trees. Over the years, the Great Green Wall has grown into a broader effort to restore ecosystems, protect water resources, improve farming and strengthen local livelihoods. It recognises a simple truth: people and nature thrive together.

India already has the scientific expertise, strong institutions and community traditions to do something similar. The recently announced Aravalli Green Wall Project draws inspiration from Africa’s experience. Its aim is to restore degraded landscapes across northwestern India and slow the spread of desertification.

But perhaps we need to think beyond isolated projects.

What if India viewed ecological restoration the way it views highways or digital infrastructure? What if every degraded riverbank, abandoned mining area and eroded hill became part of one national restoration mission that connected forests, wetlands, grasslands and farms? What if success were measured not by the number of saplings planted but by groundwater restored, biodiversity returned and rural livelihoods improved?

Climate change no longer respects political boundaries. Dust storms, heat waves and shrinking water tables do not stop at state borders. Our environmental response cannot remain fragmented either.

Sometimes the best ideas come from watching the neighbourhood. If Africa, despite limited resources and enormous developmental challenges, can unite behind an ecological vision stretching across an entire continent, surely India can imagine one that matches the scale of its own environmental ambitions.

Van Mahotsav comes and goes every year. What should remain is a larger national ambition. Not, “How many trees did we plant?” But, “What landscape did we restore?”

That is the difference between planting for a season and planning for a century.

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