It started in a kindergarten classroom. As the head of the gardening committee at her son’s school, Kapila Chandan found herself leading tiny hands through soil and lesson plans about the Earth. But what began as a school project soon became a personal awakening. A lawyer and chartered accountant by training, Chandan was stunned by the statistics she uncovered during her research — vanishing glaciers, record temperatures, species disappearing every day.

Around the same time, her sister Sweta Kawar Daga, a practising chartered accountant, found herself drawn to the idea of planting hope, quite literally. Her father, who had planted over 20 lakh trees, was her inspiration. “For me, it was easy. Whoever plants a tree, plants hope,” she smiles. As they exchanged stories over family dinners and long phone calls, something shifted. “We didn’t want our kids to grow up seeing plastic instead of trees,” says Chandan. 

That urgency, rooted in motherhood, soon became the foundation of Nature Crusade, Chandan’s brainchild. She left both her jobs for it and Daga continued to hustle between work and her passion project, to reimagine tree planting as a meaningful, everyday gesture. “Why send flowers when you can gift a forest?” Daga asks. “We began offering plantations for birthdays, memorials, anniversaries and geo-tagged each sapling so people could track their tree. It created a living legacy.”