30,000 km, 27 countries in 100 days: All you need to know about Sadhguru’s motorbike journey to ‘Save Soil’

One of India’s most popular spiritual leaders, Sadhguru, or Jaggi Vasudev, on Monday embarked on a 100-day motorbike journey from London to India as part of his foundation’s ‘Save Soil’ awareness campaign across Europe and the Middle East en route to India.

The 64-year-old guru will travel 30,000 km in 100 days, visiting 27 nations where he will engage with world leaders, the media and leading experts across the globe to emphasise the urgent need for concerted action to Save Soil.

The spiritual guru is aiming for a homecoming in New Delhi in 75 days in honour of India’s 75th year of independence.

We take a look at what is this Save Soil campaign and how Sadhguru will travel the world on his BMW K1600 GT motorcycle.

Save Soil campaign

The Save Soil Movement is part of Sadhguru’s Conscious Planet initiative, which aims at turning the world’s attention towards dying soil and growing desertification. The focus is on getting countries to institute national policies towards increasing the organic content in cultivable soil.

According to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), over 90 per cent of the earth’s soil could become degraded by 2050 leading to catastrophic crises worldwide including food and water shortages, droughts and famines, adverse climate changes, mass migrations and unprecedented rates of species extinction.

This ‘soil extinction’ is the gravest threat to humanity right now, as our planet is losing the ability to grow food because of rapid soil degradation.

The mission plan of The Save Soil Movement is to activate and demonstrate citizen support across nations, and empower governments to initiate policy-driven action to revitalise soil and halt further degradation.

The campaign is backed by the World Food Programme and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.

At an event last week at the Indian High Commission, Sadhguru highlighting the importance of soil said, “It’s extremely important that we act now. I’ve been talking about this for over 24 years, but solution can only happen when there is positive policy in every nation.

“It is still snowing in many parts of Europe and we’ll be going through that on a two-wheeler. At this age, it’s not really a joy ride. So why am I doing this? Because over 300,000 farmers have committed suicide in the last 20 years. Not just in India, across the world this is happening… one of the main concerns is soil depletion.”

The movement has garnered worldwide support and renowned personalities such as conservationist Dr Jane Goodall, the Dalai Lama, Deepak Chopra, Tony Robbins, Matthey Hayden, Chris Gayle, Juhi Chawla and Sanjeev Sanyal have all championed this cause.

30,000 km bike ride

A bike enthusiast, Sadhguru’s bike journey isn’t child’s play.

Travelling alone, he aims of covering 27 countries and a distance of 30,000 kilometres during which he will speak of the importance of soil.

He will be joined by celebrities including the Colombian singer-songwriter Maluma, England rugby player Jonny Wilkinson and German footballer Michael Ballack at public events in cities including Amsterdam, Berlin, Geneva and Tel Aviv.

Sadhguru wants his motorcycle journey to reach 3.5 billion people, a scale he hopes will provoke a tidal wave of political action.

This isn’t the first time that Sadhguru has taken to campaigning. In 2017, he had launched Rally for Rivers, a campaign to revitalise India’s river networks.

Sadhguru drove almost 10,000km through India to garner support for political action and in the end the campaign claimed it won the backing of 162 million people.

With inputs from agencies

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