For 24-year-old Kritika Saxena, the sight of plastic flags littered everywhere after the independence day was disturbing. What if we had flags which people didn’t want to throw away at all?
This was the trigger for Saxena’s unique idea of seeds-carrying flags. The flags, made of handmade/biodegradable papers, carry seeds which sprout when the paper is planted in the soil and grow into saplings.
Talking about the process, Kritika told to TOI,
“The base paper, made from waste cotton fibre, has tomato and chilli seeds embedded and once sown it grows up as plants even with minimum moisture in the soil. The idea is basically to reduce plastic or paper garbage during I-Day.”
Kritika started working on the flags in July and planned to manufacture just 1,000 flags. However, in the last few days, the Delhi-based biotechnology engineer has sold seed-flags to more than 14,000 residents of Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Lucknow.
“Once I announced the availability of seed flags through messages on WhatsApp, the response was so good that I started getting requests not just from Delhi, but also from other parts of the country,” she said.
Now that her initiative has gone viral, many schools all over the country have requested for these flags from her. The dimensions of these seed-flags are 2×3 square inches, and each flag costs Rs 8.
