sapgreen

2 days back, I received a call from someone I didn’t know. She asked me whether she could plant a tree on behalf of her friend. This was a difficult question. We have still not setup our office properly (Inauguration day on 7th April, Ugadi). None of the items required were ready (saplings were still in their nurseries). Although we had all the necessary permission from the city planners, we had not yet finalized on which place to start our planting. So, there was a big dilemma. Yet, the person on the other side of the call was so keen to do this for her friend, we could not say no. Moreover, I was still wondering about the trouble she would have taken to make up her mind to call us up for the sake of her friend. We said “YES”.
She then told more about who her friend was. Her friend is my ex-colleague/friend at my previous company and he is to go abroad next week. And she is his fiancée. Now, it was clear how she came to know about our website (not yet completely operational) and our work. I was really happy to see her keenness on doing this gesture for him.
Today, they came down to Mysore to visit a few people. I am still not sure whether she had already told about the tree to him or whether it was a surprise to him. He came down to my place, we talked about our old days at Bosch. Well, not so much into the past After lunch, when both were about to leave, this is what happened:

I hope that made both of them happy. We showed our happiness by planting another tree for both of them for being the first ones to plant with the help of Sapgreen (Even before official start!!). We are yet to send them a receipt (Some more legal formalities yet to be completed before we can do that). The greeting card for him is also pending (Not yet printed as we were not yet prepared so soon).
The work is not yet complete. Tree guards are yet to be tied around it so that the trees will be relatively safe. In the evening, I watered the plant since the rain clouds of the morning vanished in the evening.

Thanks for Sandeep and Vaishnavi from Sapgreen on behalf of the trees.
Wishing both a great future ahead, a happy earth and a happy team at Sapgreen.

Trees have different meanings to different people. And there are a few who seem to consider trees as their purpose of existence. One such person is Hyder Ali Khan.
He bends the laws of nature and tames trees. Yet, his respect for the trees is immense. He experiments on trees. He has performed successful surgeries on trees. His trees grow at extraordinary pace and sometimes in totally unforgiving soil. His trees look like well behaved pets growing in the manner he wishes.
Hopefully, Sapgreen will be working with him in the not too distant future.

There are a thousand different issues in this world which concerns everyone but evokes the response of only a few. Sometimes these issues affect the individual in a noticeable manner yet fail to attract his slightest attention. Loss of trees is one such issue. We are losing trees at the rate of a football field every second and this loss is directly fueling the warming of our planet. The temperature difference is noticeable even in a time period of one decade. Yet, most think that planting a tree would concern some third person and not himself. When this is the general thinking, how do you make planting trees a “must have” for individuals?
Our solutions to this problem: Find new meanings for trees.

Ages ago, some fellows discovered that flower bouquets could be presented like gifts. If those fellows had simultaneously discovered that trees could also be used the same way, we wouldn’t have a problem now. Now this task of convincing people that trees could be gifts rests upon us and a few like-minded people.
A tree gift card could be used as a gift. We as a planned organization would plant the trees and maintain them in one of the many parks or unused spaces in the city. Since the tree location would also be mentioned in the card, the person could visit the tree everyday if he so wants.

We plan to start the campaign shortly to create some sort of interest among people. One of the methods would be stickers as shown here. The intention is to make people think about trees in a different perspective. The motto behind this idea is: “You find your own meaning for trees. Birthdays, celebrations or whatever. We will be happy to plant one for you”.

This is a long post and this describes almost every activity till end of 2007. Since the higher priority in 2007 was the software we worked on, the activities with respect to trees were minimal.
No business plan is done overnight. And with a vague, untried idea of ours, preparing a business plan was all the more difficult. Moreover, almost everyone we surveyed wanted to plant a tree. With only positive answers, it becomes a lot more difficult to judge whether we are on the right path. In spite of that, we finally decided that we had to go ahead with preparing our business plan. We decided that we would work on this over gtalk after office hours and during weekends. Even free hours at office were not wasted. More about the business plan later.
Now that we had decided that the name of our tree-planting venture would be sapgreen, our first task was to register the domain. In fact, we had thought of some more names before we finalized on sapgreen. Unfortunately, getting a domain name is not as simple as one would like it to be. Almost all the names you could think of have been taken by someone in some part of the world. If you want to experience this first hand, click here: uwhois.com
We had a template for preparing a business plan. Following is a link to the business plan template we used: Business Plan. Our whole plan revolved around one objective: To find out waste or unused government lands and plant them with trees in whatever way it is possible. And we wanted to do this by making trees a “must have” item instead of a “good to have” item. Only when people see trees as a “must have” is it possible to plant the extraordinary number of plants we plan to. We plan 1 crore trees by 2018 (even after accounting for some tree losses).
Some of the ways we thought to promote trees as “must haves” was by marketing trees as gifts. If person A wants to gift a tree to person B, A would contact us and pay us the cost. We will plant the tree for A at some place in the town. The problem here was: “Where is the personal touch?”. When you give a flower bouquet, it is something. But how does planting a tree in some faraway place make sense? So, we thought of sending a gift to person B which says that a tree has been planted in her name and she could visit it at a particular location.
Now, we had a dozen logistical problems. How do the people pay us? How do we collect the address? How do we send the gift? When do we plant? Where do we find the laborers? How much would it actually cost? What are the government rules for planting trees by private people? When we had the answers for all of these and many more questions, we thought the business plan was complete. But, we were wrong as we found out some months later. We now know that a business plan is a living thing and it keeps on developing.
We did some surveys among people we knew. The most often asked question was “Why would people believe you?”. This was a tough one to answer because of the fact that we were “someone”s working in some cubicle in one of many software companies. So, how would anyone believe that we would actually plant a tree after they paid? This question is one only time can answer completely. The only thing we knew was that we had to start somewhere. Everyone was a “someone” till he actually started on his mission.
Our original plan was to finish all the planning and other legal work by December so that we could start our operations from Jan 2008. But we never knew of the delays in government
processes. First thing we did was to get the name registered. We found that company registration process could now be done online and hence tried doing it on our own. After some days of understanding the process, we were in a deadlock situation. This was not the sort of problem which was meant for engineers. We contacted an auditor. You can know more on the registration process here: Steps to form a company
After some paperwork and a lot of waiting, we obtained DIN (Director identification number). This is the first step in registering a company. A digital signature device was the next step. The next big step was the check for company name availability. You can send more than one name in decreasing order of priority to check for name availability.
XYZ pvt ltd wont be accepted by the registrar of companies. The objecives of XYZ company should be present in the name too!! And for some unknown reasons, the names get rejected. Finally after more than 2 months and 2 rejections (totally 8 names rejected), we got a name which was not what we originally had thought. And the name had become a mile long: EnLEn marketing and renewable energy systems private limited. The renewable energy was added because our extended business plan now included plans on promoting renewables as well.
Although we were denied our original name, we still named our website www.sapgreen.com because this does not have any restrictions. Also, we like the name EnLEn because it stands for “ENvironment Life ENergy”.
Next process is the company registration itself. This does not involve much headache if you have an auditor. But it definitely doesn’t finish overnight. For us, it took exactly one month. Finally, we had our company registration papers in hand.
Yet, this is not the end. We still have PAN registration, CST registration, bank account creation and so many more to go. The only relief is that these do not stop us from commencing business. I recently read a 2008 report on doing business in India (You need Adobe PDF to read this). And now I know why India is ranked so low in almost all charts. I hope this changes soon.
Apart from the registration process, there were many other happenings which went pretty smoothly. One of the most important ones was a meeting with Manivannan, then commissioner of Mysore city corporation. I had heard so much about him, I felt he was the right person to talk to about the plans to green empty patches of the city.
One afternoon when I was just back from Bangalore, I went to the MUDA office to try and get an appointment with Manivannan. There I was told that he was at the Corporation office. So, I went there and talked to his secretary. From all I had heard about government offices, I was not so optimistic about getting past his secretary. But I was surprised. The secretary was extremely helpful and I was talking to Manivannan within an hour. I explained him my plans and sought his help in using unused government land for growing trees. He referred me to Prabhakar Hamige, executive engineer at MCC who was also extremely helpful. Some days later, he called me himself and told me to attend a citizens committee meeting at the corporation. I was really surprised by his call. I applied leave for the next day and came down to Mysore on my bike. Here I learned about how the corporation works and also happened to meet many people who have since helped me a lot in my plans for Mysore.
December 28th 2007 was the last day at Robert Bosch. I was out of the luxuriant and safe software job and was now on an uncharted path. More about the plans and how we moved forward with it in the next post.

June 2nd week 2005. The days at SJCE, Mysore had come to an end. I had finished my greatest objective in life till then which was to become an electronics engineer. Each of my classmates went in different directions albeit within Bangalore. I lived in Bangalore just like most migrants to Bangalore do, with other friends in a small rented house. 4 of us, all electronic engineers from SJCE rented one of the many shackles in the concrete jungle of Bangalore. One of my roommates was Anil. I worked at Robert Bosch and Anil worked at Celstream. For the next 2.5 years, it was pretty much routine. Wake up early, jog, maneuver through the infamous Bangalore traffic, slog in front of the computer, ride back, sleep and repeat. It was a typical software engineer’s life.
Now, a software job has its benefits too. You get to travel to foreign lands. And my visit was to the place where Bosch originated, Stuttgart in Germany. September 15th, 2006 was the date when I flew to Germany and everything changed thereafter.
Germany is a beautiful green country with great respect and care for the environment. Almost every weekend in Germany was spent at one of the countrysides with like-minded friends. In fact, the cities also did not differ much from the countryside in the number of trees or greenery. The sustainably managed trees of Black forest, the botanical gardens within Stuttgart and old trees of Rosenstein park all had a profound impact on me.
After 3 months at Germany, when I came back to India, Anil had gone to Noida to join another software company, ST Microelectronics. A few days at Noida and he had already got the feeling that software companies did not differ much from one another. Except the pay of course.
So, we started discussing about a different path. The path less taken. To start our own company. Our only criteria was that it should not again be like the same jobs where we don’t know how we are contributing to the world. We wanted to do something which would actually give some meaning to our efforts.
After many months and after numerous business plans, we were still not sure whether we were on the correct path. One day, during a gtalk session, Anil asked me whether I was interested in the NGO model. I said that I wanted to plant trees but not in an NGO model.
Finally, after a lot of discussion, we were pretty much sure of what we had to do. We named it sapgreen (Meaning, the color of the leaf). Our plan slowly started to develop on google docs. More about our plan in the next post.