“I have been getting hostile calls from residents, asking me why I am doing this, where do I live, where am I from,” says Padmavati. “People just don’t realism that when the area around a tree is concretised, the tree stops growing. It just looks green. But I’m not giving up,” she adds.

Environmentalists see this as a welcome start for a city where trees have been proven to be under stress. A study by the Forest Research Institute, commissioned by the New Delhi Municipal Council in 2007, found that due to loud noise and air pollution in the city, trees in the NDMC area, which also happen to be some of the oldest in the Capital, were under high levels of “stress”. Consequently, the NDMC announced a first-of-its-kind tree ambulance earlier this year.