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In 2017, Pragati Chaswal had a simple problem: her son wouldn't eat vegetables. She started growing food with him on their rooftop. He began to eat. And then something unexpected happened.

"What I noticed was so much more," she recalls. "He was connecting with soil, observing how plants grew, noticing when it was hot or cold, and beginning to understand that plants, like him, needed care."

She founded the SowGood Foundation. She brought rooftop gardens to schools across Delhi-NCR. She trained teachers. She built curriculums around soil and seeds. She made children crouch over planters, feel earth between their fingers, watch things grow from nothing.

Today, 78,000 children across Delhi's schools have learned through her programme. They grow romaine lettuce and broccoli and herbs in rooftop beds above classrooms where they would otherwise be memorizing facts for exams. They are learning, instead, that food comes from somewhere. That living things require attention. That patience produces something real.

This is not an agricultural story. It is an urban story.

Delhi is one of the world's most polluted, most densely populated, most infrastructurally stressed cities on earth. Its schools serve children who will inherit a city that is running out of clean air, clean water, and green space. What Pragati Chaswal understood — from a rooftop and a child who wouldn't eat broccoli — is that cities don't change through policy alone. They change when children learn, in their bodies, that the world requires tending.

The SowGood Foundation is not a government programme. It is not a tech startup. It is a woman who started with one problem and followed it, with patience, until it became a movement. That is how cities actually change.

(Source: City Farmer News, SowGood Foundation — April 2026)

_{Seoul's school system is one of the most high-pressure on earth — a system built around exam performance, academic ranking, and the grueling preparation for the suneung. The idea of a rooftop garden as a curriculum tool would, in many Seoul schools, be considered a distraction. And yet Seoul has been investing quietly in urban agriculture — community gardens on apartment rooftops, school garden programmes in some districts, urban farming as a response to air quality anxiety and food security concerns. What Pragati Chaswal has built in Delhi — a programme that reaches 78,000 children through the simplest possible premise: grow something, eat it — is a model Seoul's education reform conversation should be taking seriously. Not as a replacement for academic rigour, but as the thing that makes children capable of enduring it.}

_{Tokyo has a long tradition of urban farming — pocket vegetable gardens between buildings, community plots in the gaps left by demolition, rooftop farms on department stores. The city has embedded food production into its urban fabric in ways that are almost invisible to visitors but deeply familiar to residents. What is less developed in Tokyo is the school-based dimension of urban farming. Japan's education system, like Seoul's, tends toward the academic and away from the embodied. Pragati Chaswal's model — which starts with one child's reluctance to eat vegetables and ends with a citywide movement — is the kind of bottom-up educational innovation that Tokyo's school system, for all its strengths, has not produced. The city that has mastered urban agriculture as landscape should now ask: what would it look like as curriculum?}

London has been investing in school gardens for decades — the Capital Growth programme, the RHS Campaign for School Gardening, the network of urban farms that has spread across the city since the 2010s. London has the infrastructure and the policy commitment. What it sometimes lacks is Pragati Chaswal's starting point: a single, personal, human reason. The most effective urban farming programmes in London have often been driven by individuals — a teacher, a parent, a school cook — who began with a specific child or a specific problem and expanded outward. The SowGood Foundation's growth from one rooftop to 78,000 children is a case study in how personal motivation, rather than policy mandate, produces lasting institutional change. London's urban farming networks should be studying it.