A mobile application developed by an eight-year-old girl is helping to improve the green cover in Jharkhand.
Agrata Tiwary developed the Trilovera app in 2019 through which users can access popular e-commerce websites, daily news, videos and games. The profit gained from the app is used to plant trees.
In a span of over a year, the app has led to the planting of over 70 trees across the country with nearly 40 being planted at Patamda block in East Singhbhum district of Jharkhand.
Agrata started her education at Sacred Heart Convent in Jamshedpur before shifting to Green Acres Academy in Mumbai (where her parents are based).
A screenshot of the Trilovera app. Bhola Prasad
“The idea to develop this app came during Diwali in 2019 when I saw my family members shopping online and the delivery boys coming on bikes to deliver at home. This made me think that they were contributing in adding carbon to the atmosphere, directly or indirectly. I consulted with my aunts who are software developers and created the app in early 2020 which would use its profit to plant trees and reduce the carbon in the environment,” said Agrata, who is presently at her grandparents’ house in Bistupur, Jamshedpur.
Her father Bikrant Tiwary is the CEO of grow-trees.com, a web-enabled cost-effective service for individuals and companies globally to enable the planting of trees.
“We named the app Trilovera, taken from the words ‘tree lovers’, and integrated popular e-commerce websites like Flipkart, Amazon, Tata Cliq, ride-hailing apps like Ola and Uber, food delivery apps such as Swiggy and Zomato and others like BookMyShow, MakeMyTrip and Oyo as a single-point solution for users to access the app of their choice.
“When they use Trilovera to access these apps, the transactions will help us to plant trees in India at no cost to the user. Trees will be planted from the money received on Google Ads, marketing on the users’ behalf,” added Agrata.
Agrata, a Class III student, also took extra coding classes to hone her skills and develop more games and video and integrate them into the app.
“There is no such platform in India that cares for the environment by planting a tree free of cost for using an app. There is a website search engine called ecosia.org in Germany, that is planting trees for every search that happens on its portal. In a short span of over an year the Trilovera app has found over 1,600 users and grow-trees.com has helped in selecting sites for the plantation of trees. Since we are from Jamshedpur, we selected Patamda block near the scenic Dimna Dam for the plantation of trees,” said Bikrant.
Agrata Tiwary and her father Bikrant Tiwary work on the laptop at their house in Jamshedpur Bhola Prasad
According to Bikrant, the app generates Re 1 per every use of approximately 100 times and it costs nearly Rs 85 to plant a two-feet sapling.
According to the biannual India State of Forest Report, 2019, Jharkhand witnessed a marginal increase in itsforest cover by 58.41sqkm from the previous assessment (2017).
Praising the initiative of Agrata, Birsa Agricultural University forest scientist S.M.S Quli suggested the government develop a scientific agro-forest model in Jharkhand to increase its green cover.
“In Jharkhand farmers face constraints of small land holding and are mostly dependent on rainfall which puts them at high risk in the wake of an uncertain monsoon. This factor makes farmers shift to an alternative form of livelihood like forest products and this leads to a cascading effect of deforestation. The government should develop a scientific agro-forestry model so that farmers do not have to depend on forest resources for livelihood,” said Quli.
