Where forests and livelihoods take root together.
Banani Foundation restores green cover and builds durable rural incomes across Odisha — one plantation, one watershed, one community at a time.
In Odia, banani means a forest — a grove of trees standing together. It is the idea we are built on: that ecological restoration and human wellbeing grow best side by side, and that a green cover only lasts when the people who live beside it have a stake in keeping it.
Read it like a cross-section.
Our symbol is the growth rings of a tree — the record a forest keeps of every year it has lived.
The rings
A tree's cross-section is its own archive of good years and hard ones. It's why we measure our work by what survives and recovers — not by what is merely planted.
A fingerprint
Together the rings read as a single whorl, like a fingerprint. No two forests — or communities — are alike; each identity is its own.
The open channel
One path winds from the core to the edge — the Mahanadi threading through the land, and knowledge flowing outward to the people who tend it.
The seed
At the centre sits a single amber seed. Every forest, and every partnership, begins with one seed planted.
A trust for the land, and for the people who live from it.
Banani Foundation is a registered public charitable trust based in Cuttack, Odisha. We work at the meeting point of environmental conservation and rural livelihoods — restoring degraded land, expanding native tree cover, and helping communities build lasting incomes from a healthier natural world.
Three roots of the same tree.
Conservation, afforestation and livelihoods aren't separate programmes for us — they hold each other up.
Environmental Conservation
Protecting the ecosystems Odisha depends on — its water bodies, wetlands and native biodiversity.
Afforestation
Bringing back the tree line with native, survival-first plantation — not planting for the count, but for the canopy.
Community Livelihoods
Restoration that pays its way — so the families closest to the land earn from keeping it alive.
From roots, to trunk, to canopy.
A deliberate sequence. We don't plant first and hope — we listen, restore, and then stay long enough to measure.
Listen & assess
We start with the community and the land: what has been lost, what will grow here, and who depends on it. No restoration without local ownership.
Plant & restore
Native species, raised in local nurseries and planted with the people who will tend them. Livelihood is designed in from day one, not added later.
Sustain & measure
We track survival, income and ecological recovery over years — and hand over systems that keep working once we step back.
Grow this with us.
Whether you give, partner or lend your hands — there's a place for you under this canopy.