Turning the Independence day into an eco-friendly one, a New Delhi based girl has created the Indian flag made of seed paper. The interesting part is that you can sow it and it will turn into a sapling.
The flags were bought by about 4,000 Bengalureans for the past few days and was developed by 24-year old Kritika Saxena, a biotechnology engineer. Due to increasing use of plastic every Independence day, she came up with this wonderful initiative of developing seed flag in July and reach an initial target of 1,000 flags.
While talking to Times of India, Kritika says, “Plastic flags ultimately end up in dustbins or roadside. I started working on the seed flag in July and the initial plan was to manufacture about 1,000 flags. Once I started floating the seed flag availability 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. Till date, I have sold over 14,000 flags to many places including Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Lucknow.”
Many schools and individuals have also made requests and Kritika has couriered them these flags. “Each flag is priced at Rs.8 per piece and their size is 2×3 square inches. The base paper, made from waste cotton fiber, has tomato and chili 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,” she added.
The best part is after the Independence Day, instead of throwing the flag and contributing to the environmental pollution, you can sow it and raise the flag as a sapling.
Further, Krithika said that due to its popularity, she has now started getting requests from corporate companies in Bengaluru but due to time constraints she couldn’t meet their demand.