 We are moving towards seventy-third Independence Day. Time has come to free India of water crisis. If we cannot grow our food and we don't have water to drink, what are we going to do with our freedom? So, this is a call that everyone must take. In the seventy years since 1947, as a nation, we have many achievements. Our businesses have been built, our scientists have done incredible things. But the greatest achievement in independent India is that our farmers, with very minimal infrastructure, without any great modern scientific knowledge, just armed with traditional knowledge and wisdom are feeding 1.25 billion people. We have treated them so badly that in the last ten to twelve years, over three lakh farmers have committed suicide. One of the most important reasons why farmers are suffering is, there is a serious degradation and depletion of our water resources and the soil condition. How the soil used to be seventy years ago and how our soil is today is hugely, hugely depleted. However, all the water bodies were in this country seventy years ago and how it is today, there is a serious depletion. Our rivers on an average have depleted over forty percent. Our groundwater has depleted substantially. The volume of water that was available in 1947, seventy-two years ago per capita, today only twenty-one percent of that is available. So after seventy-two years, once again we need to free India from a severe soil depletion and water depletion. In a tropical nation, there is only one source of water which is monsoon, the rain. So the water that comes down upon the land in sixty days, we must hold it in the land for 365 days. The only and only way we can hold it is that there must be substantial vegetation. So the only way is to increase green carbon. There is no question of increasing forest because the population pressure is so big. The only way we can go ahead is agroforestry, horticulture, tree-based agriculture essentially. If a farmer shifts to agroforestry within five to seven years, his income has gone up three hundred to eight hundred percent. We have shifted sixty-nine thousand six hundred and seventy farmers into agroforestry in Tamil Nadu. Every year we're putting two to three thousand farmers into agroforestry. If you go at this pace, it will take another eighty to hundred years. By then, it'll be too late. I'm seeing how to crush this time of hundred years into twelve-year project. So as a part of this, we are running a campaign right now for people to support to plant a tree. Freeing India of water crisis means just this. If we put back India's land, at least one-third of it under shade, if you put it back, groundwater will replenish in huge way. Based on this, we are looking at how to plant two point four to a billion trees in the next twelve years in Cauvery basin so that the volume of water we sequester in the basin will be nine trillion liters of water, which is more than forty-five percent of Cauvery River right now. So freeing India is not just about Cauvery. To free India from water crisis and soil depletion means this is a quarter of human population, which if this population goes into soil distress and water distress, what will happen will be upon the conscience of entire humanity. It is not going to be pretty at all. We are moving towards seventy-third independence day. Time has come to free India of water crisis. Freeing India of water crisis is the independence movement that we need right now. We have a free land. If we cannot grow our food and we don't have water to drink, what are we going to do with our freedom?