Sapgreen

New Sapgreen (This will be last post at blogspot)

noreply@blogger.com (Ashwin) — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 15:45:00 +0000

Sapgreen has been revamped. The process is not yet complete as it is intended to be an ongoing process.
The site will be an experiment for community based tree planting and environmental discussions. More about the changes are written in the following post: Sapgreen is New.

Also, the blog which is written here at blogger will hereafter be continued at Sapgreen Website's blog itself:

www.sapgreen.com/blog

Rural solar lighting - Market survey - Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Ashwin) — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 13:39:00 +0000

In our quest to know more about the rural market for solar power, we headed towards villages around HD-Kote which is about 45kms from Mysore. We understood that rural market in India cannot be generalized using the statistics that big time marketers use. Each village is different from the next village. Statistics such as "average electricity ‘outages’ across states in rural areas round the year is almost 14 hours per day" do not make much sense really. What we saw was totally different and unexpected. Here are some of our questions and the answers we found direct from villagers.

1. How is the power situation in your village?

Ans: During summers, we experience more than 12 hours of power outages but now we have just 2-3 hour of outages.

2. So, what do you use at night for lighting when there is a power outage?

Ans: During nights, we don't have that many power-cuts. Even if it is there, it is only for an hour or two.

The villagers it seemed never cared much about the loss of power for 1 or 2 hours.

3. How about a solar light for your home?

Ans: The cost would be too much for us. Moreover, we can just use a standard lead-acid battery for charging when there is power. So, why do we need to buy an extra solar panel?

Although a lot of subsidies are provided to reduce solar panel costs, the reality is that grid electricity is also heavily subsidised in villages. The time for ROI just doesn't justify the costs involved in buying a solar panel. Moreover, villagers don't really care about ROI and stuff. What matters is the initial investment amount involved.

To summarize, solar lighting is not a real necessity in villages which are electrified. Power outages in the grid do not justify buying solar panels (at least at its present costs). A good, cheap battery management system would have a lot of buyers though.

And there was more to learn about rural people. They expect product warranty. They expect the product to be as good as the products in the city. They expect products to be comparable in prices to even chinese products. They expect high value for low prices. They ask for suggestions from fellow villagers before deciding on a product (so unlike city people).

You meet these demands and you have a winning product. To understand the bottom of the pyramid, you got to see it for real.

The launch myth

noreply@blogger.com (Ashwin) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:49:00 +0000

Here are some brands that had no launch at all: Starbucks, Apple, Nike, Harry Potter, Google, William Morris, The DaVinci Code, Wikipedia, Snapple, Geico, Linux, Firefox and yes, Microsoft.

Read the full article at Seth's blog...

Google Maps

noreply@blogger.com (Ashwin) — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 11:48:00 +0000

Finally, Google Maps has Mysore in high resolution. This should be useful in a lot of different ways. The satellite images however are at least an year old. This I can tell from construction activities captured by the satellite images.
Example use: We can mark locations where we planted trees directly on the map. See below.

Sapgreen Park on Wikimapia

Can be done..

noreply@blogger.com (Ashwin) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:34:00 +0000

SELCO: The company brought light to 75,000 homes since 1995 making profitable business at the same time. It is difficult to even imagine that a product worth Rs.18,000 could be sold to a household with less than Rs.50 per day income. Yet, the company did. Today, they have brought extra income into the households of so many people. They have done their bit in reducing the global warming problem. They won the Ashden awards twice, once in 2005 and again in 2007.

NEST: Another solar company which innovated in making a smaller version of CFL lantern making it more affordable. A lantern just Rs.1200 thereby making it much more affordable to the poorest of the poor. The company sold 50000 lamps and now plans to sell it in African countries as well. Won the Ashden award once.

Looking at these companies, I get hope. Business can co-exist with environment. Business can co-exist with people. No business model is not impossible.

LED

noreply@blogger.com (Ashwin) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 07:53:00 +0000

Since a few weeks, the sapgreen page and blog looked inactive. The main reason was that there were no new stories to tell. The trees are being planted on a regular basis. The number is one short of 250 now. The rains which initially eluded us have come back. Looks like the Karnataka chief minister's prayers have succeeded to some extent :)

I, personally however didn't stop blogging and have been fairly regular at livejournal. Our work too had a different direction apart from trees and we were concentrating more on that. Being an electronics engineer, new technology never fails to interest me. Not the Ipod type of technology. Rather, its the advancement in basic technologies that is more interesting. The incandescant bulb was created in 1879 and the technology remained the same for more than a century. It is only recently that CFLs began replacing the bulb. Now, even CFL bulbs are on the verge of getting replaced by the semiconductor revolution. LED or Light emitting Diode is one of the most efficient types of light source. The LED delivers much greater brightness and consumes just a fraction of the power required by conventional light bulbs. Furthermore, LEDs last almost for a lifetime. Even under adverse conditions, you can expect LEDs to last for at least 6-10 years. Compare that with an incandescant bulb that lasts for a few months or a CFL which lasts for 2-3 years. The only drawback with LED as of now is the relatively higher cost. The payback time (as compared to CFL bulbs) in terms of reduced electricity bills is 2-3 years. However the payback in terms of reduced carbon emissions is immense.

Even more important are the benefits LEDs offer when combined with solar technology. LEDs consume less power and hence a smaller sized solar panel is sufficient to power it. The cost of the LED is more than offset by the savings in the solar panel. A solar enabled LED home lighting system would thus mean a light source with minimal maintenance and minimal recurring cost for a lifetime. We have been working on this technology for a while now and it looks ever more promising. I will keep this blog updated on the happenings.

Hurray!!! Site is up!!

noreply@blogger.com (Ashwin) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 13:37:00 +0000

Site Down!! --Courtesy Indiatimes.

noreply@blogger.com (Ashwin) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 07:24:00 +0000

Sapgreen.com is down. Due to lack of service from Indiatimes.com, we transferred the domain to a different hosting/DNS provider. Indiatimes now refuses to transfer it immediately and the result: No sapgreen.com!!! Right now, I'm just waiting for customer support to find a solution.

No posts, No rains !!

noreply@blogger.com (Ashwin) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 08:17:00 +0000

Well.. The posts at Sapgreen never showed up for the past month. And so did the monsoons (Excluding one or two light showers). I guess this part of the country will be declared 'drought-hit' this year. The skies still look blue when black/grey is the expected color.

Last week, all of a sudden the rains came for 2 consecutive days. All it did was to fool me into believing that the monsoons were back on track. We planted some 20 trees for ajit last thursday and the rains all of a sudden stopped.

I guess this is a sign of the days to come.

SJCE trees

noreply@blogger.com (Ashwin) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:05:00 +0000

Today, our SJCE campus which already one of the greenest places in Mysore became even more greener. We planted about 60 trees today within the campus, mostly courtesy of Surya and group. All of them are 2005 SJCE alumni. Now they have more than one connection with the SJCE campus.

This would not have been possible without the help of JSS Director of Horticulture, Shivashankarappa. From our experience with government officials, we thought that he may also have some specific requirement of trees. To our surprise, he gave us complete freedom to plant any tree. In his words: "Kaadu aagli bidi aa jaaga (Let that place be a forest)".
(Photo: Tree Being planted by my friend, Venugopal. JSS director of horticulture, Shivashankarappa, Anil and me from right to left)
We plan to put up a board over there sometime with a reference to the origin of the forest in the future when the trees are a little older.
Lots more can be planted in SJCE. Anyone wants to grow a forest?
(Photo: The bare land planted with saplings which in a few years should be a dense forest)

Updates

noreply@blogger.com (Ashwin) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:26:00 +0000

49 saplings were planted at Gokulam Park on Saturday, thanks to Naveen.
8 saplings were planted today at Vijayanagar park.
3 saplings were planted today at Kuvempunagar.

Much more remains to be done..
30 saplings to be planted in Bangalore.
15 saplings to be planted at SJCE, Mysore.

Environment Day Update

noreply@blogger.com (Ashwin) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 17:34:00 +0000

25 trees will be planted by Onmobile employees at Bangalore:
Our Devaraj Urs Road plan for today has got delayed and will take another few days to materialize.
On Saturday, because of the initiative by Naveen, Gokulam Park will get about 50 trees.
On Saturday itself, about 10 more trees in residential areas of Mysore.

"Cut the other tree"

noreply@blogger.com (Ashwin) — Wed, 28 May 2008 06:44:00 +0000

Some years back, there stood a large tree in front of those shops. I don't know what happened to that tree. What still exists is the circular concrete slot meant for the tree. Since the slot was anyway meant for a tree, I asked one of the shop owners about it. They directed me to the manager who in turn directed me to the building owner. And guess what the owner says.

"I will allow you to plant this tree if you cut down the tree on the other side of the shop. That tree is spreading its roots and is destroying my building. I don't know whom to contact to get this cut. So, you cut the tree and I will allow you to plant any number of trees".

Whom do I blame? The forest officials who have planted one with lateral spreading roots as an avenue tree? The building owner who thinks that he is doing a favor by allowing me to plant trees and hence I should do a favor to him by cutting the other one? Or the city's local authorities who don't even have trees on their agenda? One official even asked me to think of growing lawns instead of trees.

I feel like waging a losing battle. But I also know it is worth fighting for.

Handcrafted-Recycled-paper cards

noreply@blogger.com (Ashwin) — Tue, 27 May 2008 03:01:00 +0000

We are in the process of improving many of the small yet very important things at Sapgreen. As a result, the 'tree gift' cards we send have been completely given a fresh look and personal feel to it. The cards are now made from hand-made paper. Even the envelope is one of its kind. All designed by my sister and Applied-Art design student, Aashitha.

250 Saplings. One Aim.

noreply@blogger.com (Ashwin) — Wed, 21 May 2008 14:12:00 +0000

Today, we have procured 250 very large saplings with one aim. A greener Earth.
First of all, about the saplings. These are approximately 10 feet in height and of various varieties. Indian Tulip, Rain tree, Mahagony, Wild Almond, CannonBall tree, Maulsari, Saptaparni, Kassod, Indian Almond, Neem, Champak, Bhadrakshi, Rudrakshi, Bilvapatra, Soapnut, Kadamba, Weeping fig, Dhalichandra and Bauhinia. Owing to their height, we expect 100% survival of the saplings irrespective of where they are planted. So, we would not have to do the painful task of replacing failed saplings.
Secondly, where are we planting them? Watch out for these trees in and around Mysore in the next few days.

Things to do

noreply@blogger.com (Ashwin) — Thu, 15 May 2008 16:39:00 +0000

Its been 39 days since Sapgreen became operational. Even before start, there was optimism on various issues and there was pessimism on a few. However as the days progressed, doses of reality and the day to day operational hurdles took away much of our time and focus. Pessimism started to creep in. A sapling beautifully budding today is dead the next morning and why? Less than 1 second of inhuman attitude of some unknown entity. The sorrow just takes away all the focus and attention required towards the larger purpose.

Today however when I talked to GVK, I was properly pointed to the the problem areas and the possible solutions. Based on these and some of my own, expect all of these to happen at Sapgreen within a month:

More than 50 trees to be planted at prominent places of Mysore. All of these will be 10-12 foot saplings so as to prevent any damage from people/animals. More details on this in the next blog. The saplings though will reach Mysore next week.
Saplings to be planted at school(s) to educate children about trees and make them associate themselves with trees. More details on this a few blogs later.
Creating web pages for people of localities the city where in they can access information/news about their locality. For example, Gokulam will have a web page which will act as a one-stop info-center for its residents. Each web page will also have a "Green" Page which will address all environmental issues including trees. The page will be collaborative in the sense that members themselves will update info.
An option to embed your photo in the tree-gift-card, an updated better version of the card itself, more information regarding trees on our website and beautification of the website.

I am also thinking of something on the lines of open-source-software where many different people contribute to achieve amazing results. More on this in later blogs.

As a last note, as I was writing this blog, my sister told me that she had just finished working on a new image for our website. I just updated the website.

Silence on blogosphere

noreply@blogger.com (Ashwin) — Tue, 13 May 2008 13:35:00 +0000

The sapgreen blog has been silent for a few days now. There wasn't much news happening to report here. Only regular planting of a few trees. I had an interaction with an interesting person, Arun who planted 12 trees in a vacant park in front of his home in Hebbal. He plans to slowly, over a period of years plant all over the park and other adjoining areas. Some day, this will be another 'laughing waters' (A locality with hundreds of trees planted mostly with the single handed effort of Naveen Chimmanda). I will write detailed blogs on these admirable people some other day.

And then, we have environment day coming up on Jun 5th. We plan to plant many many trees if we get the required support. This is in participation with UNEP's billion tree campaign. We are also planning various activities to promote the cause as well as promote sapgreen.com.

And regarding the trees planted on Ugadi, all except 8 are in good state. These 8 saplings need some explanation. 2 were neem, 4 are mayflower and 2 are spathodea. The neem were killed by some thoughtless people for the healing qualities of its leaves. Neem = the goose which laid golden eggs. The mayflower and spathodea most likely were broken at the top by children playing cricket. I have tried to put in some wisdom in the cricket boys' heads. Have to wait and see if they get the point. The neem need to be replaced whereas mayflower and spathodea are still alive and are budding again. A lesson we have learnt is that trees less than 10 feet should never be planted in places frequented by humans.

The next post will have some details on our programs leading to June 5th.

Finally, it rained

noreply@blogger.com (Ashwin) — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:18:00 +0000

It is the first major rain since Ugadi.

Home Delivery

noreply@blogger.com (Ashwin) — Mon, 05 May 2008 08:45:00 +0000

Home delivery by Sapgreen meant that we would send a laborer with the sapling to people who wanted to plant trees at their homes. The price was just Rs.125 since the owner of that house himself would maintain that tree after the planting was done. The services provided were that our laborer would transport the sapling to their home and then plant the sapling too. This we now feel does not fit well with our core model of planting trees at public spaces. The reasons:

Transportation of saplings from one place to another all day takes a heavy toll on them.
Transportation doesn't look feasible when the saplings are to be planted at locations which are far-off from each other. For example, for planting just 2 saplings, we had to travel 10kms in one direction, then back and again 10kms in the opposite direction of the city. Totally, 40kms. We are not talking just about the economic feasibility here. Bicycling 40kms itself becomes so difficult for the laborer that planting the tree afterwards becomes an impossible task for him.
The end result when time is used as a metric is too less. 2/3 trees in a day by one laborer is not worth the effort.

We plan to shelve this idea of home delivery since this doesn't add much value addition anyway. We will now only be concentrating on our core plan of individual tree sponsors and companies who would be willing to plant trees in public spaces.

New ideas

noreply@blogger.com (Ashwin) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:16:00 +0000

What seems to be simple in theory is sometimes tough in practice. Delivering trees to homes is an extremely challenging job. We have planted a few trees till now at people's homes and every time we found the task extremely satisfying. But we need to fine-tune our method of doing this. In the current method of tree planting, we interact with only the owner of the house who wants to plant the tree. Moreover the cost of saplings, transportation, laborer charges etc is just enough to meet the expenses (Due to lower numbers).

The best solution for both cost-efficiency as well as better reach is to get communities to plant trees. For example, residents of Gokulam 3rd stage could form a community and decide to plant trees on a certain date. From our side, we could provide an online forum for the community as well as arranging for planting and maintenance of the trees. An offline community also needs to be in place for better participation. The community members could then decide a date and plant trees all at once.

This has other benefits as well.

Large numbers of trees creates news locally and hence creates further interest.
The price for planting could be decreased even further.
Some residents who are interested in raising saplings could do so as a hobby and get rewarded for it too.
The forum would serve as a place for discussing the larger issues of global warming and climate change.

Your feedback on this post would trigger us to create such a forum. I hope the above writeup was clear enough. In case of any doubts please comment.

Forwards

noreply@blogger.com (Ashwin) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:32:00 +0000

Although much remains to be done on the operations end, we felt that the marketing part was even more important. So, we thought of some ideas for reaching out to a wide online audience. One way is through emails and forwards. And we do not like spamming people. So, our best option was to create emails which catch the attention of readers so that they forward them themselves. Spoofs of ads is one such attention grabber (Sprite's Khabristan spoof ad for Pepsi's Youngistan ad). Although we don't have the ridiculing motive of the usual spoof ads, we just are trying to piggyback on the popularity of some of the recent ads.

More such ads in the making...

Spreading a Word

noreply@blogger.com (Ravi K S) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 22:45:00 +0000

Well, after all the efforts from the three of us, the website was up and running and it was time to let MORE people know of its existence. I say MORE because it is already familiar to quite many of our close ones who have been encouraging, motivating and supporting us.

Yesterday night, I started out composing the mail from outlook and wanted to send it from my Gmail account. All the formatting was lost with Gmail. The quick option I could think of was to have a picture of the content to be sent. I ended up doing it but the size of the image was quite high [ 1MB ]
Sent it to a few friends and Ashwin's mail id was also involved with it. He noticed the size & notified me. Helped me get a JPEG version of the image which was just around ~60KB :)

So, I set out again on the mission to spread the word. Orkut CSV file download option came handy with this task of collecting the email ids of all the people I know.

I was 70% done when I could not proceed further as GMail popped up an info msg telling that I am done with the limit of 500 emails a day.. :-/
Had to wait till today to finish the rest.

Importantly :- What needs to be spread is neither the content of my email, nor about Sapgreen, Its the message about saving our environment, caring and protecting it.

Q&A

noreply@blogger.com (Ashwin) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:18:00 +0000

We are faced with a list of questions here which need to be answered in our website. The problem with answering in the website is that it takes a lot of time. In a website, all the information should be told in as less space as possible and it should be visually appealing too. No one likes to see a plain text-website. Until we update in the website, here are the Q&A.

Ques 1: How do you justify charging Rs.300 for a tree you grow in a public place?
Ans: Trees are not just about planting and forgetting them. To know this best, ask a farmer how he looks after his trees. Trees require care and watering at least until they see 2 rainy seasons. Pruning also becomes necessary to avoid branching at a very early stage. Hence, maintenance is a must for every tree. Although just 10% of the cost goes towards procurement of the sapling, upto 60% of the cost is required for planting and maintaining the tree itself. 5% of the cost goes towards insuring the tree. Another 10-15% is required for the website and other information media. An even more fine breakup would include tree-guard costs, transportation costs etc.

Ques 2: We know of other organizations who plant for even lesser amounts. How do they manage?
Ans: Yes. Even we know them. The only difference between us and them is that we can assure you that you tree is taken care of until it is self-sustainable. We bring a personal touch by sending you a card with information about your tree. We even provide the status of your tree on our website: http://sapgreen.com/index.php/findmytree.html

Ques 3: Why a business rather than an NGO?
Ans: We love trees. And we want more people to love trees. An NGO brings along with it the notion that by planting trees you are doing charity. A business on the other hand brings the concept of value for money spent. When you spent Rs.300, we want you to see value in the money you spent. By spending on trees, we want people to get a sense of attachment with the tree. Such sort of an attachment slowly but effectively makes more and more people care about trees.

Ques 4: Could you make the card more personalized by maybe including photos as well?
Ans: Yes. We would like to do this if we somehow get to solve the logistical problems involved with this. Following are the issues that need to be solved:

Printing a card is a pretty costly affair if each card has to include a photo of the sapling as well. However, the price can be reduced by decreasing the size if the photo maybe. So, not much of an issue here.
If each card has to be printed with a separate photo, we need to wait till the day of planting, take the photo of the sapling, then send the image to the printing shop and wait till he prints it. All this takes substantial time. This much time may not be accepted by all.

The Process getting in place

noreply@blogger.com (Ashwin) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 17:26:00 +0000

Our tree planting process is getting streamlined these days. This has to be so. Otherwise, many details are obvious of getting missed out. For example, without a proper process and a workflow, there is no guarantee that we will have actually planted the tree after we have received money from our "tree friends". One such process involves tagging the 'planting ID' to the sapling.

This serves the purpose of identifying the sapling by anyone when many saplings of similar type are at the same location. Following Pictures describe how we tag the saplings.

That is not all. You can still find the trees in the park using our map shown below. Every new map will be updated in the http://sapgreen.com/index.php/findmytree.html page also. With all of these, I hope finding your tree will be as easy as it can be (All you need is your planting ID). For example, in the below map, you can find 102 at the lower left corner. This is the tree with planting ID KA0901102. You can type the same ID and click on submit in the findmytree section to know the status of the tree. The status page also shows a photograph of the tree when it was planted.

The only thing I am wondering is "How do we provide the same features for offline people?" Please comment if you can think of a method.

Oh, and by the way, our payment gateway is up and running beautifully. So, we are now able to say that tree-planting can now be completely online.

Anil is Happy

noreply@blogger.com (Ashwin) — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 15:18:00 +0000

http://greenpreneur.blogspot.com/2008/04/am-i-still-away-from-trees.html