In a unique effort to spread awareness about the need for environment preservation, women in Uttar Pradesh’s Shahjahanpur have been tying rakhis to trees and offering them fertilisers instead of sweets.

Raksha Bandhan will be celebrated on Monday.

The women participating in this campaign are part of a WhatsApp group called ‘VIP’. The group is headed by a committee which plans and coordinates its activities.

Raksha Bandhan symbolises the sacred feeling of a brother and a sister taking care of each other. The idea behind this initiative was to help people connect with the environment so that they are inspired to conserve it, committee president Neetu Gupta told PTI on Sunday.

“We decided to get women to tie rakhis to trees. Since last Thursday, the members of our group have been tying rakhis to trees, applying tilak on them and watering them after mixing fertiliser in the soil as sweets,” she said.

“In view of the deepening climate change crisis, we thought that the best way to protect the environment is to plant trees on a large scale. For this, work was done in mission mode and this year, the target is to plant one lakh trees,” she added.

Gupta said the women associated with the group have tied rakhi to about 1,000 trees so far.

Municipal Commissioner Vipin Kumar Mishra praised the initiative and said there is a need to turn it into a mass movement.