Rudraksh,
the smart tree

The problem

A forest fire can start in dry grass and undergrowth and spread before anyone reaches the spot.

Some fire-watching satellites pass over a forest only at discrete overpasses, a few times a day, and the alert delay after a pass varies. Geostationary satellites make the opposite trade: they watch the same region around the clock, but their thermal imagery gives up fine detail, so a small fire can be difficult to detect depending on the sensor and the conditions. A fast moving fire front can still grow before anyone knows.

That gap is what Rudraksh is built around: better ground sensing, camera detection, and a tree that is already standing in the forest when a fire starts.

Where it started

In my 12th grade summer break I went to ISRO's IIRS campus in Dehradun for a summer geo-sensing programme. There I learned geosensing: how satellites read the earth, what they can see, and what they miss. That is where the question started. If a satellite can miss a fire between passes, what could watch from the ground instead?

My first answer was not a tree. It was Honeycomb, an artificial beehive fitted with thermal and 360 cameras and vital sensors, meant to hang high on living trees. Honeycomb stayed on paper and I never prototyped it, but the question stayed with me: what if the forest had its own guardians?

That question became Rudraksh: a grid of artificial smart trees planted through plains forests. Each tree is designed to watch for fire, spray it out with groundwater, and double as a ground sensor. The same sensing can help track animal movement for their welfare and record ground conditions that matter when planning infrastructure like highway routes.

The design

I sketched the tree as a vertical system, and every part has one job:

• A suction pump at the base draws groundwater up the trunk.
• Partway up sits a fire extinguisher ball, designed to burst onto a fire that reaches the tree itself.
• The sensors live behind a curved access door and watch the block of forest around the tree.
• The spray nozzles sit at the crown and throw water outward like a sprinkler.
• Below ground, a borewell feeds the pump. In the mountains, where there is no groundwater, the design uses built reservoirs instead.

This interior layout comes from my sketches; it shows the job each part was designed to do.

Building the tree

Height

8 feet

Trunk

Round pipe, about 8 inches across

Weight

About 30 to 35 kg

The build moved from testing components in a bucket, to forming the tube body, to running the wiring through the inside, fitting the pipes and hoses, painting, and finally fitting the branch crown.

Showing it

The finished tree went to the CBSE science exhibition with a full stall, banners and the story around it.

I also made a short story film of the tree: a scientist and a forest officer walk past it, tagged deer move through the grid, and the sprayers contain a fire across nine blocks. The film is an animation made with AI-assisted rendering and a synthetic voice.

Watch the film on YouTube

Failures and learnings

Honeycomb taught me the first lesson. A device hung on a living tree could look down, but it could not reach the ground: no water, no soil readings, and animals might damage it. I never built it, and moving past it is what gave me the artificial tree.

And I try to stay honest about what the tree proves. The exhibition tree shows the build. The wider grid of trees is a design concept; what exists today is one full-size tree, its film, and the record below.

The bigger vision

One tree guards one spot. The real design is a grid: trees planted every 100 metres, about a hundred per square kilometre, all solar powered.

• Each tree watches its block. If fire breaks out in one block of a three by three grid, the neighbouring trees burst their release so the fire cannot travel past them. Small fires are sprayed out locally.
• The branches act as fire sprayers fed by groundwater in the plains, and by built reservoirs in the mountains where there is no groundwater.
• A buried water belt around each tree bursts in a critical fire and forms a water curtain that protects the tree and its components.
• The same grid can triangulate animals moving through it and show their movement patterns.

The grid is a design concept. The single exhibition tree is what exists today, and the network has not been tested in a forest.

The record

The making, the move and the show, from the project record.

The making

Moving it and setting up

The show