The Uttar Pradesh Forest Department has big plans for July 31. It is planning to plant one crore saplings on a single day and make it to the Guinness Book of Records, that too without any funds from the Government.

Apart from Government employees who put in a day’s salary to pay for the saplings, schoolchildren, farmers, industrialists and corporates too are pitching in for the drive. “There is no Government grant for the drive and everything, including the plants, have been paid for without any subsidy,” said Rupak De, Additional Principal Chief Conservator of Forests. The department has been at work for the past three months to make the drive a success.

The last such record was made in 2002 in Nagapattinam district of Tamil Nadu where more than 80,000 trees were planted in 24 hours by 300 people.

“This is an effort to increase the tree cover in the state and generate mass awareness about the same. All efforts to break this record will result in the planting of even larger number of trees and thus serve the cause of involving citizens in planting trees for the betterment of global ecology and environment,” said B K Patnaik, state’s Principal Chief Conservator of Forests, from Lucknow.

A global positioning system (GPS) has been used to identify sites and the growth of the saplings will be monitored till the time they become trees. Eight thousand such sites over 70 districts of the state have been selected for the plantation drive, which will start at dawn and end by dusk on July 31.