Varanasi Nagar Nigam Offers Free Saplings and Tree-Guards for Home Planting

Varanasi Nagar Nigam will give free saplings with tree-guards for home planting under the Prime Minister's Ek Ped Maa Ke Naam campaign. Municipal teams will dig pits, plant and install guards at residents' houses after requests lodged on the Smart Kashi app, Mayor Ashok Kumar Tiwari and Municipal Commissioner Himanshu Nagpal said at a Friday presser.

The 21 August 2026 briefing was held at the Smart City auditorium in Sigra. The mayor said residents can contact the mayor's office for a free sapling plus tree-guard. The corporation bears about Rs 2,740 per plant-plus-guard package. Teams dig the pit, plant the sapling, install the guard and record a caretaker, or palak, for each tree.

Survival figures cited at the presser showed 8,000 planted in 2024-25 with 5,543 alive, and 20,000 planted in 2025-26 with 19,269 surviving. This year's target is 25,000 saplings with guards. Zone-wise counts of plantings with guards so far were given as North 10,305, Rohaniya 6,713, Cantt 6,236 and South 4,746.

For the new financial year the corporation has earmarked Rs 7.45 crore for 25,000 guards across eight zones plus two-year upkeep, and Rs 1.29 crore for a Miyawaki forest at Sarang Talab, officials stated. Commissioner Nagpal said demand should be filed through the Smart Kashi app with ward, mohalla, house number and mobile details. Species listed included maulsari, amaltas, neem, arjun, peepal, pakad, bargad and gulmohar.

The home-planting model pairs each sapling with a metal or concrete guard and a named caretaker, rather than leaving roadside stock unprotected. Higher survival in 2025-26 (19,269 of 20,000) compared with 2024-25 (5,543 of 8,000) was presented at the briefing as evidence that guarded plantings perform better. Those figures are reported as cited by the corporation, not independently audited here.

Smart Kashi digitises the request so ward teams can schedule pit digging and installation against a mapped address. Recording a palak creates a local accountability trail for watering and protection through the two-year upkeep window funded in the Rs 7.45 crore guard budget. The separate Rs 1.29 crore Miyawaki allocation at Sarang Talab sits alongside, not inside, the household sapling offer.

This package is distinct from the already-circulating Banaras Hindu University drive of about 5,000 saplings at Malaviya Bhavan. The Nagar Nigam announcement concerns free home planting with guards citywide under Ek Ped Maa Ke Naam, routed through the mayor's office and Smart Kashi, not a campus ceremony.

Species choice spans shade and native options familiar on Varanasi streets — neem, peepal, bargad, pakad, arjun — alongside ornamental flowering trees such as amaltas and gulmohar and the fragrant maulsari. Officials did not publish a per-species quota in the Friday presser cited here.

Residents can request a free sapling and tree-guard through Smart Kashi; Nagar Nigam has budgeted for 25,000 guarded plantings across eight zones in the new financial year.