Union Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on Saturday, 6 June 2026, hailed Prime Minister Narendra Modi's tree-plantation initiative #EkPedMaaKeNaam as a programme that has transcended national boundaries, describing it as a gift to the world in the cause of environmental protection.

Posting on X, Goyal wrote: 'पर्यावरण संरक्षण की दिशा में प्रधानमंत्री @NarendraModi जी द्वारा देश को समर्पित #EkPedMaaKeNaam, पूरे विश्व का कार्यक्रम...' — roughly translated as, 'Ek Ped Maa Ke Naam, dedicated to the nation by Prime Minister Modi in the direction of environmental protection, is a programme for the entire world.'

Context

Ek Ped Maa Ke Naam — literally 'One Tree in the Name of Mother' — was launched by Prime Minister Modi on World Environment Day, 5 June 2024. The campaign urges every Indian to plant a tree as a tribute to their mother, weaving an emotional and cultural thread into a mass afforestation drive. The timing of Goyal's post, a day after World Environment Day 2026, underscores the campaign's annual resonance.

The initiative was conceived as a citizen-led complement to India's formal forest and tree-cover targets. The government has set a goal of bringing 33 per cent of India's geographical area under forest and tree cover, and mass plantation campaigns form a key pillar of that strategy.

Policy Backdrop

India's afforestation ambitions are embedded in its broader climate commitments, including a net-zero emissions pledge by 2070 submitted under the Paris Agreement. Successive COP meetings have seen India position its green-cover expansion as a measurable contribution to the global carbon sink.

Citizen-participation campaigns such as Ek Ped Maa Ke Naam are designed to mobilise tens of millions of households simultaneously — a scale that state-run plantation drives alone cannot easily achieve. By attaching the act of planting to the cultural reverence for motherhood, the campaign aims to convert a one-time gesture into a long-term stewardship habit.

Stakeholders and Impact

The primary beneficiaries are Indian citizens and local ecosystems, but the campaign's framing as a 'world programme' signals an aspiration to inspire similar citizen-led drives internationally. Environmental groups have broadly welcomed the initiative's emphasis on grassroots participation, while also calling for robust monitoring of survival rates of planted saplings to ensure ecological impact beyond headline numbers.

For the BJP and the Modi government, the campaign also carries political salience — positioning India as a proactive climate actor ahead of multilateral forums and reinforcing a narrative of development coexisting with environmental responsibility.

What's Next

With World Environment Day 2026 having just passed, attention will now shift to verified plantation tallies and whether the campaign has formalised any international partnerships or outreach programmes. Progress reports on cumulative saplings planted since the 2024 launch are expected to be a key metric by which the initiative's scale is judged in coming months.