In late 2024 I almost joined the board of an Indian environmental NGO that I will not name. They were good people. They had a homepage with a giant counter that read 4,82,917 TREES PLANTED. I sat through their pitch deck. I sat through three calls. I committed to being on their advisory board. I wrote a cheque.

Six months later I asked them where the 4,82,917 trees were. They could not tell me. There was no GPS log. There were photographs of plantation drives but no follow-up survival audits. The number on the homepage came from “additive sapling counts” which meant: every sapling ever distributed to anyone for any purpose, whether or not it was actually planted, whether or not it was alive a month later, whether or not it was alive at all. The number existed because a number was needed for the donor deck.

I do not blame them. They are not corrupt. They are just exhausted by the saintly framing they have been forced to operate inside for thirty years.

The saintly framing works like this. You are a saviour. Your donors are saviours. The trees are sacred. After a few years of writing this language, you start to believe it. After ten years, you cannot remember how to write any other way. The trouble is not that it is dishonest. The trouble is that it does not produce verification discipline.

The honest pitch is also the operationally rigorous pitch

This is the insight that became wonarth. If the pitch is “we are selfish, we want a livable city, we are running a transactional restoration venture for people who want the same things” then the entire epistemology shifts. We are not saints. So we have no reputational stake in pretending. So the survival rate is published whether it is good or bad.

The selfish frame is not just a marketing differentiator. It is an operational discipline. The two are the same thing.

What I am not saying

I am not saying every existing NGO is broken. Some are extraordinary. The Foundation for Ecological Security has done quiet, brilliant work for decades. The Wildlife Trust of India publishes its science. There are individuals inside large NGOs whose integrity is unimpeachable.

I am saying the saintly framing imposes an operational tax on all of them, and the tax is heavier than anyone wants to admit. wonarth simply refuses to pay the tax.

What this costs us

It costs us the donor segment that wants to be told they are heroes. That segment is large. That segment writes the bigger cheques. We are giving up that segment by design.

What we are buying with that loss is the segment that is exhausted by the saintly performance, and that segment is now larger than the saintly segment in 2026.

If we are right, wonarth becomes the institution that other people quietly defect to when they get tired of being told they are saints. If we are wrong, we go bankrupt with our integrity intact. Both outcomes are acceptable.

— Prashant Kumar Nair, Founder, wonarth