Elephants, cows, and a thousand-year-old temple

Some days you go out to give something. Other days you come back having received more.

On 10 August we travelled to Shri Nakalang Mahadev, a temple in Paldi-Kankaj, Taluka Dascroi, on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. It is said to be around a thousand years old, and that it was built by Nakul — one of the five Pandava brothers. Standing inside a place that has held people's prayers for ten centuries does something to your sense of scale.

We came to serve. We fed cows on the temple grounds, and we fed three elephants — enormous, gentle, patient animals who took food from our hands as though they had all the time in the world. There is no way to hurry an elephant, and that is exactly the lesson.

Then we walked the temple. Not quickly. We spent the day there in devotion — for peace, for self-belief, for the kind of steadiness you can carry back into ordinary life.

People sometimes ask why an environmental foundation spends a day feeding animals and visiting a temple. Our answer is simple: our work has always been about the relationship between people and the living world around them. A tree, a cow, an elephant, a child — it is one continuous thread of care.

Five schools, three days, a thousand children

Ask a child what they remember about a good day at school, and it is rarely the lesson.

Across three days in July — the 15th, 17th and 18th — DEV Foundation visited five government schools around Ahmedabad and distributed biscuits and cold drinks to roughly 1,000 students. It was our largest school program yet, and logistically our busiest.

We do this deliberately. Government-school children are the same children we donate books to and train in fire safety — and showing up for them with something simple and joyful, expecting nothing back, builds the trust that makes the serious programs work. A child who has met us on a good day listens differently when we return to teach.

The noise in those classrooms was tremendous. We would not change a thing about it.

Twenty cows and a morning of gau seva

Not every program needs a banner.

One morning in June, we went out and fed twenty cows with fresh green grass. That was the whole plan, and the whole of it was carried out. No stage, no speeches, no crowd — just animals who needed feeding and people willing to feed them.

Gau seva sits naturally alongside everything else we do. Our work has always been about the living world: the trees we plant, the children we teach, the animals we feed. They are not separate causes. They are the same instinct, pointed in different directions.

We will keep doing mornings like this one, and most of them will go unphotographed. That is fine. The cows were fed either way.

3,000 trees in one monsoon week

Every gardener in Gujarat knows the rule: if you want a tree to live, plant it when the rain comes.

That is why DEV Foundation waited. The monsoon softens hard summer soil, keeps young roots damp while they take hold, and spares a sapling the shock of Ahmedabad's heat in its first fragile weeks. Plant in May and you spend months carrying water. Plant in monsoon and nature does the work for you.

So when the rains arrived, we moved. Over a single week our volunteers, families and friends put more than 3,000 saplings into the ground — our largest drive in fourteen years, pushing our running total past 53,000 trees since 2011.

Now comes the part nobody photographs — the caring. A planted tree is a promise, not an achievement.

Teaching 300 children what to do when danger strikes

A fire doesn't wait for you to figure out what to do. That's exactly why we started this program.

Over six months, DEV Foundation partnered with a fire-safety expert to train 300 orphaned children in how to respond when danger strikes. We ran it as three batches of 100 rather than one big session — because safety isn't a lecture you sit through, it's a skill you practise.

They learned the basics that save lives: how to stay low, how to get out, who to call, and how not to panic. For children who don't always have an adult to turn to, that knowledge is a kind of protection they carry with them.

Where it all began: a birthday and a tree

Every big thing starts small. Ours started with a birthday and a single sapling.

In 2011, the idea for DEV Foundation took root with Kartik Panchal. The plan was almost too simple to call a plan: every time someone in the family had a birthday, they would plant a tree. And every World Environment Day, they would plant again.

Slowly the rest of the family joined in. The count grew quietly — hundreds of trees, then thousands. Many were gifted to people to plant and care for themselves, because the goal was never just trees. It was the habit of caring for them.

Fourteen years later, that birthday ritual has become 53,000 trees — and a foundation working across the environment, education, child safety and community welfare. But the heart of it hasn't changed.