“Earlier, honestly, plants just never worked for me. I would buy them, try my best to keep them alive, but they either stopped growing or slowly dried out,” says Vijay Shanker Dubey (48), an Associate Vice President at Reliance Jio and a resident of Noida.

“I used to blame myself. I thought maybe I just was not good at keeping plants. I did not realise that the real problem was choosing the wrong plants for my home and not understanding what they actually needed.”

A few kilometres away, Professor Nidhi Chaudhary, a biotechnology professor from Noida, had reached a similar impasse. “I followed all the basic instructions. I watered them regularly, placed them in sunlight, and even changed their pots,” she recalls. “The leaves still turned yellow, and growth remained weak. That is when I understood that plant care is not just routine maintenance. Basic care was not enough.”

For Ratan, a gardener living in Sector 44, Noida, the challenge was professional rather than personal. “Earlier, gardening was mostly physical work. We worked on experience. If a plant was not doing well, we would try something different, but we did not know the reason behind it. I did not understand why a plant needed a certain treatment,” he says.

Their stories intersect in the journey of Avichal Ojha, a 25-year-old entrepreneur from Surahi village in Ballia district of Uttar Pradesh. What began as a humble college assignment, undertaken with just Rs 500 and delivered on a scooty along the bustling streets of Noida, has since flourished into ‘TheGreenWealth’, an enterprise now touching the lives of over 10,000 households across India.

In Surahi, agriculture is not an abstraction. It is daily life. Fields stretched into the distance, and conversations revolved around rainfall, seeds, and crops. Avichal grew up in this environment, absorbing a familiarity with plants long before he understood it as expertise.

“I was always inclined towards plants. When you grow up in a village, you see how much care crops need. You learn that growth cannot be forced,” he tells The Better India.

When the time came to pursue higher education, he chose to study agriculture at Amity University, Noida. The move exposed him to a different reality. Towering apartment complexes stood where fields might once have been, and balconies were often bare.

“When I shifted to Noida, I saw pollution and very little greenery,” he says. “People wanted plants inside their homes, but they did not know how to maintain them. There was interest, but not enough guidance.”

In June and July 2018, during his graduation, he was required to undertake an entrepreneurship project. Students were expected to conceptualise and execute a small business. Drawing on his longstanding interest in plants, he borrowed Rs 500 from his parents and purchased a small batch of saplings. It was........

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