Father Robert Athickal helped a small group of schoolchildren in Patna turn local tree-planting efforts into one of India’s largest student environmental movements.Tarumitra trained generations of young people to restore degraded land, protect native species, practice organic farming, and organize around environmental problems.Athickal combined Jesuit teaching with Indian philosophy, arguing that humans had moral obligations toward animals, plants, rivers, soils, and other forms of life.By trusting students with real responsibility, he showed how modest, local action could grow into a movement involving hundreds of thousands of young people.
The first members had no office, no money, and little authority. They were schoolchildren in Patna, a crowded city on the Ganges, worried about the trees being cut around them. They met after class, visited other schools, planted saplings, and spoke to anyone willing to listen. Some traveled by bicycle to carry their message farther. Their organization had a name, Tarumitra, meaning “Friends of Trees,” though for a time it consisted mainly of students and a small circle of adults helping them.
Among those adults was a Jesuit priest who believed that children could be trusted with serious work. Father Robert Athickal, who died on July 19th, aged 73, spent nearly four decades developing that idea. From its beginnings in Patna in 1988, Tarumitra grew into one of India’s largest student environmental movements. It established groups in schools and colleges across the country, trained generations of young campaigners, and created a reserve for threatened plants from the Gangetic plain.
