Almost every Indian environmental NGO website I have ever seen has a giant counter on it. The number changes by the second. It says things like 4,82,917 TREES PLANTED. The number is always going up. The number is the point.

The number is also, in almost every case, a lie. Not a literal lie. A definitional lie. A counting trick dressed up as proof.

What the counters actually count

“Trees planted” almost always means “saplings distributed at any plantation event we have ever held, summed across years, regardless of whether they ever went into the ground, regardless of whether they survived the first month.”

The number on the homepage is a cumulative receipt of effort, not an estimate of living biomass. The donor reading it assumes the latter. The NGO knows it is the former. Nobody corrects the misunderstanding because the misunderstanding is the conversion mechanism.

The counter is not a measure of impact. It is a measure of the donor’s willingness to be lied to politely. Which, to be fair, is also large.

The alternative is harder and slower and worth it

The honest alternative to a homepage counter is the field report. Not a dashboard. Not an aggregate. Not a clever live-update widget. A field report. With a date, a location, GPS coordinates, a species list, a cost line, photographs, and survival rate at 30, 90, and 365 days from planting.

The field report is hard to fake. The field report does not let you add the dead saplings to the live ones. The field report makes the failures visible at the same place and in the same typography as the successes, because that is the only honest way to count.

The field report is also less impressive than the counter. A field report will say “1,068 trees alive at 30 days on a 2.4-hectare site in the Aravalli buffer.” A counter will say “FOUR LAKH NINETY THOUSAND TREES PLANTED ACROSS INDIA.” The counter wins the donor in the first scroll. The field report wins the donor in the third year, when they decide whether to renew.

The deeper reason

If your homepage has a counter on it, your operations team starts, slowly and unconsciously, to optimise for the counter. The counter goes up faster when you distribute more saplings, regardless of whether they survive. The counter goes up faster when you stop bothering to track what happened a year later.

The counter is the goal-displacement engine of the Indian environmental sector. It is what makes plantation drives produce numbers without producing trees. We refuse it because we want the trees, not the numbers about the trees.

If you find this restraint less impressive than a giant ticker climbing toward eight figures, I understand. The ticker is more dopamine. We are not selling dopamine. We are selling restoration that is real enough to outlast the ticker.

— Prashant Kumar Nair, Founder, wonarth