KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS 13. Green Kerala Tree planting that survives the dry season, not photo-op saplings. The engine’s persistence check is the difference between a number and a forest. A school near Adoor plants two hundred saplings every Environment Day. There is a photograph, a newspaper line, a count entered in a register: two hundred trees. By the next dry season perhaps thirty are alive, and no one counts those, because the reward was for the planting and the photograph, never for the tree. The children who carried water to their sapling through April get no more credit than the ones who never came back. This chapter is about the thirty that lived, and how to make them the number that matters. A planting count is easy and almost meaningless; a survival count, verified a year on, is harder and worth everything. The difference between the two is the difference between a press release and a forest. The behaviour we want to make ordinary Tree-planting drives are common in Kerala and their survival rate is poor, because the reward attaches to the planting photograph and not to the living tree a 188