The Better India · 18 hours ago

Gutli Man of India Turned Mango Seeds Into Orchards That Help Farmers and Restore Green Cover

When Jasmit Singh Arora began collecting discarded mango seeds in 2019, people laughed - including his friends. "But I had a vision," he says, and that vision was rooted in something he witnessed traveling through rural West Bengal: farmers trapped in poor soil and failing harvests, searching for a way forward. What followed was quietly extraordinary - a video made with his daughter, seeds arriving from schools and soldiers and juice vendors across India, and more than 11 lakh gutlis transformed into saplings grafted with local mango varieties and given free to farmers. From a single overlooked seed, Jasmit built a movement that now counts thousands of participants and over eight lakh fruit trees taking root in the earth. It turns out that what most people discard without a thought can, in the right hands, become a forest.