It was a proud day for the students of the Corporation Boys Higher Secondary School, Nungambakkam, in Chennai. The students at the school donated 1,000 saplings of fruit trees to the Chennai Corporation, all of which were raised from waste material and left-over food.
Ask them about their saplings and the boys at the school are an excited lot. “We used seeds from used fruits and bags for the saplings from milk packets and plastic bags. Then we brought food waste like banana peels to help it grow,” explains K Chandrasekharan, a student of the school. “We need to be careful. It will be damaged if you pour less water or if the packet has too many holes or if the seed is not good or it is in the shade or ...,” says V Lokesh. “Some of them are very late to grow. It can take even six months,” says Nirmal Kumar.
The project was initiated by the Indo-International Initiative for Billions of Fruit trees (IIIBFT) associated with the Loyola College of Business Administration (LIBA). The NGO aims at ensuring food security through planting fruit trees in all available spaces.
The Nungambakkam High School is the first school where the project has been taken up in the city.
The NGO is now expecting to increase this to nine more schools.