There is a particular kind of person who looks at a bare concrete terrace and sees a forest. Not a metaphorical one — an actual forest, the kind that drops the temperature of a house, feeds a family, draws bees and birds, and ends up cooling something far less measurable than air.
India, it turns out, has many such people. They are not landscape architects or climate scientists. They are homemakers, retired engineers, schoolkids on summer break, women who have spent decades silently tending to pots no one notices.
And in a country that is increasingly arguing about heatwaves and electricity bills and what summer is going to feel like in a city built mostly of glass and grey, they have been doing the most unglamorous, persistent thing imaginable — growing their way out of it.
Here are four of them.
70-YO Pune Man Builds No-Soil Terrace Garden That Keeps His Home 4°C Cooler & Feeds His Family
Every morning, 70-year-old Ajay Agarwal climbs up a small ladder to his terrace and steps into something most cities have forgotten how to build: a working ecosystem. Over 400 pots hold ridge gourd, brinjals, tomatoes, spinach, pomegranate, dragon fruit — none of it growing in soil.
After months of trial and error, the engineer settled on a mix of dry leaves and cow dung manure. “The temperature in my house has dropped by about four degrees,” he says. “I live surrounded by plants, in my own oxygen, and I rarely need to use the AC.”
Read the full story here.
‘More Than a Hobby’: Kerala Homemaker Saves Rs 5000 Monthly Growing Organic Veggies on Terrace
Padma Suresh grew up helping her father in the fields of Vellarada village. Twenty years later, in a Thiruvananthapuram flat with no fields in sight, she did the obvious thing — turned her 500-square-foot terrace into one.
Today, the 48-year-old grows 20 varieties of vegetables across 200 grow bags, and on Sundays sells the surplus at Gandhi Bhawan, where her stall sells out within an hour. Between what she saves and earns, the terrace puts Rs 5,000 a month back into the family budget. “All my worries fade away when I am busy nurturing my plants,” she says.
Read the full story here.
How This Woman Transformed Her Rooftop Into a Beautiful Organic Garden in Bhubaneswar
In Bhubaneswar, Jayanti Sahoo treats her rooftop garden the way some people treat a family album — with the steady, unhurried care of someone who knows exactly when each entry was added. Her 350-square-foot terrace holds fruit trees, vegetables and ornamentals, all grown organically, all in upcycled fish crates she has been reusing for twenty years.
Her potting mix is exact, her liquid fertiliser is mustard cake and neem khali, and her pest control is mostly her own two hands. “I raise these trees like my children,” she says. After 25 years, the metaphor has earned itself.
Read the full story here.
This Delhi Teen Is Helping 42 Mothers Grow Organic Vegetables to Fight Child Malnutrition
Raghav Rai was 14 when he started coaching football in Delhi’s Nizamuddin basti. The kids were keen, but they were also tired — surviving on Rs 10 packets of chips between meals. Three years later, the 17-year-old has launched Gardens of Hope, an initiative that has taught 42 mothers across four bastis to grow palak, mooli, choulai and brinjal on their terraces, in reusable crates, from seed.
“When my first vegetable grew, it felt like my own child,” says Afroz Jamala, one of the mothers. The kids now bring bananas to practice.
Read the full story here.
