Tirupati: 'Greenman' on mission to spread environmental awareness

Tirupati: Narpat Singh Rajpurohit, 34, popularly known as 'Greenman' in Rajasthan reached Tirupati on cycle Yatra on Wednesday.

He is on a mission to spread awareness on imminent need of protecting environment across the country by moving state to state on bicycle.

He covered 22,123 kms with the reaching Tirupati and his goal is to complete 35,000 km touching each and every town and city across the country.

In Tirupati, RSS activists including Ganpath Singh Rajpurohit accorded a warm welcome to Narpat Singh at the entrance of the city and BJP leaders Gundala Gopinath, Akkipalli Munikrishna, Subramanyam Yadav and Gutha Nagaraja Royal organised a programme at Saraswathi Sisu Mandir school.

Marking the occasion, Narpat planted a sapling on school premises and explained students on need for protecting trees and save water before leaving for Nellore city via Srikalahasti, Naidupeta and Gudur.

While speaking to The Hans India, Narpat Singh, who belonged to Barmer district in Rajasthan and hailed from farmer's family, said while he was working in a sweet stall in Rajasthan, before taking up the campaign on bicycle, he used to spend 70 per cent of his income around Rs 14,000 per month on environment conservation.

He started his environmental conservation campaign on January 27, 2019 from an army camp in Jammu and after a month lull during corona pandemic he continued his campaign.

He said that so far, he covered Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala and now in AP.

He said that he was inspired to protect trees and save water after witnessing cool climate in Jammu where he was staying there along with his family members a few years back when his father working in army.

Then onwards, he was started to be telling about the importance of protecting environment which snowballed into a mission.

At every town or city, he exhorted the locals particularly students and youth to protect trees, plant more saplings, conservation of water, avoiding wastage of water and protecting wildlife from poachers.

"Till now, I have planted 91,056 saplings and rescued number of wild animals and birds including deer, state cattle Chikara, peacock, peacock, rabbit, falcon, nilgai, big owl, eagle, jackal etc during my Yatra. I started campaigning in Rajasthan that involves gifting saplings to each other on special occasions," he explained and said he had given 251 saplings to his sister Meena marriage as dowry and 151 saplings to niece Hansakar.

The only way to prevent natural calamities and to reduce increasing global temperature is growing more trees and preserving water, he pointed out.