On a July morning in Gujarat, more than 25,000 volunteers fanned out across the Gandhinagar Lok Sabha constituency with saplings in hand. By the time they were done, over 3.61 lakh trees had gone into the ground in a single hour — enough to set a Guinness World Record for the fastest mass tree plantation of its kind, using a technique that has quietly become one of urban India’s favourite tools for fighting heat and pollution: the Miyawaki method.
The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation-led effort was part of a much bigger day. Across the wider constituency — spanning Sanand, Gandhinagar North, Kalol, Ghatlodia, Vejalpur and Sabarmati assembly segments — citizens planted more than 1.26 crore saplings, split between 404 public sites and private premises. It’s the kind of number that’s easy to skim past, but worth sitting with: that’s well over a million trees planted by ordinary residents, students and volunteers, not contractors, in one coordinated push.
What is the Miyawaki method, and why does it matter here?
Developed by Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, the method densely plants native tree species — often three to five saplings per square metre — to fast-track the creation of a self-sustaining, multi-layered forest patch. Because the species are indigenous and the planting mimics natural forest succession, Miyawaki forests are typically reported to grow up to ten times faster than conventionally planted trees, become ten times denser, and support far greater biodiversity within just two to three years, rather than the decades a forest would otherwise take to mature.
For crowded, heat-stressed Indian cities — where empty land is scarce and every square metre counts — that combination of speed and density is exactly the point. A Miyawaki patch can be squeezed into a traffic median, a school compound or a leftover municipal plot and start functioning as a genuine urban forest within a few years, cooling the immediate area, cutting dust and noise, and giving birds and insects somewhere to return to.
The bigger number behind the record
The single-hour sprint is the headline, but the more consequential figures are the ones tracking what happens after the ribbon-cutting. According to Union Home Minister Amit Shah, who represents Gandhinagar in the Lok Sabha and led the launch, the constituency’s green cover across Sanand, Gandhinagar, Kalol and Ahmedabad has already risen to 11.23%, with an official target of 20% by 2029. Alongside the plantation drive, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation inaugurated 101 new “oxygen parks” in a single day, while Gandhinagar’s oxygen park count rose from 12 to 73. These aren’t ornamental gardens — they’re being positioned as functioning green infrastructure, designed with native species selected for local soil and climate, several of them planted using the same dense Miyawaki technique.
The administration is also linking the plantation push to a wider clean-mobility and clean-energy push in the same constituency: 325 new AMTS and BRTS buses are being added to phase out polluting vehicles from the city fleet, and residents are being urged to fill every rooftop — the release specifically calls out Gandhinagar’s position as the Lok Sabha constituency with the highest number of rooftop solar installations in the country — with solar panels. Officials estimate the combined greening effort could lower local temperatures by around 5% relative to comparable cities, an urban heat island reduction claim that, if it holds up over the coming summers, would be a meaningful public health dividend as much as an environmental one.
The harder part: keeping trees alive
Records are made in an hour; forests are not. India’s tree plantation drives have a well-documented survival problem — saplings planted for a photo-op often go unwatered, unprotected from grazing cattle, and unmonitored within a year. This campaign’s organisers appear conscious of that history: the release explicitly frames tree protection, not just planting, as the metric that matters, citing a special vehicle service the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation has introduced to deliver saplings directly to citizens’ homes so residents can nurture what they plant themselves — a small but telling shift from a government-executed drive to a citizen-owned one, and a reminder of how much sustainable living ultimately comes down to small, sustained personal habits rather than one-off events.
The event also sits inside a larger national pattern. Central Armed Police Forces alone are reported to have planted more than seven crore trees over the past seven years, and the Prime Minister’s “Ek Ped Maa Ke Naam” (a tree in mother’s name) campaign has become the umbrella under which plantation drives across the country — from CAPF units to municipal corporations — now get organised and counted. Whether a record-setting hour in Gandhinagar becomes a genuine urban forest or a statistic depends entirely on whether the follow-through — the watering, the fencing, the years of unglamorous maintenance — gets the same energy as the launch day did.
Source: Press Information Bureau, Government of India — PRID 2283852, PRID 2283926