Vave Gujarat

Chief minister Narendra Modi launched a social forestry campaign Vave Gujarat (Gujarat sows) on Sunday from Champaner. The annual social forestry campaign aims at sowing total 9.80 crore saplings on 13,200 hectares of land across the state during the monsoon. The ‘Virasat Van’ surrounding the World Heritage Site of Champaner was also inaugurated the same day. This forest has a great connect with Gujarat’s history. Almost five hundred years ago, when Mahmud Begda founded the city named Mahmudabad at what is now called Champaner, his focus was on greening the same surroundings. Sultan Begda encouraged people to plant trees by giving rewards as incentives. The sultan valued roadside trees so much that he used to encourage their plantation by giving away prizes to the planters. Whenever he used to see a shady-tree such as banyan or a neem or a pipal, he used to stop, call for its owner, and talk to him for a while and ask him from where he watered the tree. Mirat e Sikandari narrates the whole account of Begda’s fondness for nature. According to the book, “The climate of Champaner was very pleasing to the Sultan and he made his capital and built there a large city. In 1485, he caused to be laid out gardens like paradise around the city, and thus in short time the city of Mahmudabad was so adorned and beautiful.” The gardens were filled with flowers of different colours and fruits of every kind, like mango, almond, melon, pomegranate, grape, apple, sugarcane and fig. The description of these runs into poetry in this book. “The khirni (mimusps indica) like pale gold, with flavour like milk and sugar, being equally wholesome, and the tad (barb palm) with its juice like milk, and its tender fruit of which sharbat is made like faluda, and coconut whose pulp is like halwa and its juice most agreeable and delicious, also jack and ramphal and kamrakh and the phalsa, each of which has its own peculiar flavour and refreshes and comforts the heart and soul,” the book reads.