They chose the mud

Nobody was asked to be there. There was no client, no press and no banner.

On 15 August, a group of our people spent Independence Day standing in wet clay at village Mangalia, near our Indore works, and on the surveyed land at Anaj Mandi, with the support of Gram Panchayat Mangliya.

The photographs and the video exist because somebody thought to take them, not because a campaign needed footage. You can tell, and that is rather the point of publishing it.

This is thirty-five seconds of what the day actually looked like. It is not polished and we have not tried to polish it, because the roughness is the only thing in it that cannot be faked.

What we would point out, if you watch it twice, is the ground. This was not a patch of lawn outside an office with a row of pits dug the night before. The land at Anaj Mandi was surveyed before anything was planted on it, which is why part of the footage is somebody walking the site with a measuring tape rather than anybody holding a spade. Choosing where to plant, and which species belong in that particular soil, is most of the work. The digging is the visible ten per cent.

What matters more than the day itself is what follows it. The programme does not end with the planting. Somebody goes back at three months, at twelve months, at twenty-four months, and every year after that, and the twelve-month survival figure is the number we have committed to publishing — whatever it turns out to say.

greenlegacy@iffgroup.com

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