Purpose beyond the bottle
Baagh × Balipara Foundation
Rewilding and agrobiodiversity in the Eastern Himalaya, and why a gin brand has a stake in it.
Baagh means garden. It is a name about growing things, and the gardens, forests and farmland that give us our botanicals are under real pressure.
That is why we support the Balipara Foundation, and why we treat provenance as something to protect rather than a story added afterwards.
Balipara Foundation cumulative impact across all programmes and partners, published early 2025. Not attributable to Baagh alone.
The Foundation
It began with elephants
The Balipara Foundation was founded in 2007 by Prabir Banerjea and Ranjit Barthakur, in Assam, elephant country. It started as a commitment to protecting Asian elephants, and grew into something larger once it became clear that the fate of forests, wildlife and people could not be separated.
That realisation became Naturenomics™, a model built on the idea that ecology is economy, and that nature and livelihoods have to thrive together or not at all. Under its Rural Futures framework, communities are the stewards of restoration rather than bystanders to it: they run the nurseries, plant and manage the buffer zones, and earn from the forests they regenerate.
The Great People’s Forest
One of South Asia’s largest restoration efforts
With Conservation International, the Foundation is scaling The Great People’s Forest of the Eastern Himalayas. The current phase plans 20 million trees, over 61,000 hectares restored, and more than 178,000 people benefiting, stretching from the mountains to the mangroves across Northeast India, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Nepal.
The longer ambition is a billion trees and a million hectares by 2030. Every part of it is built around local livelihoods first.
Why it matters to us
Ingredients come from somewhere
The Eastern Himalaya is one of the most biodiverse regions on earth and one of the fastest changing. India’s botanical wealth, the citrus, the jamun, the pepper, the wild ingredients that make Indian spirits worth making, depends on habitats like it staying intact.
Supporting the Balipara Foundation is not a badge on a bottle. It is an acknowledgement that a spirits company built on Indian ingredients has a direct interest in the land those ingredients come from.
No Planet, No Party
Three words on every neck tag
It is printed on the neck of every Baagh bottle and on the shirts we make: No Planet, No Party. It is meant plainly. The drinks industry runs on agriculture, water and climate. There is no version of this business that outlives the ecosystems it draws from.
