>I mean, this almost starts feeling sort of racist when it gets down to it...

I'm Indian myself dude. It's not a race thing, it's basic human nature. If you use uneducated and underpaid people who don't care about the mission you ostensibly want them to do (which is what you'd be doing if you want to make it cost-effective against just flying some drones up there), they're not going to actually act to fulfill the mission you're transactionally hiring them for.

They're not going there with the "explicit purpose of improving the environment." They're there to collect a paycheck according to whatever terms you gave them. If those terms are "Go up there with a sack full of seeds, scatter them around, and come back down with an empty sack" they'll figure out a way to do that by the most efficient (for them) means possible.

This is basic human nature. If you're also not policing them to make sure they're not also causing ecological damage while they're there (through litter and leaving lots of traces) you could easily end up being pretty counterproductive. If you want to put them through a lot of training to make sure they don't do any of that, you're going to have to have oversight and training which, again, starts to eat away at its cost effectiveness relative to drones. And this is even setting aside the fact that people need to rest and drink water if you're expecting them to go mountaineering with a pack full of manure and seeds on their backs.

>those people can't be trusted to freaking plant some trees without destroying everything? Seriously? This is ridiculous.

The fact that you make planting trees in the backcountry sound like a brainless and easy endeavor makes me wonder if you've ever actually been in the wilderness or so much as gardened before. It's not so simplistic, especially when you're dealing with a place that does not currently have any trees. Even parts of forests that get burned out by huge fires or flooding have trouble getting tree-growth back for a long time because grasses and shrubs outcompete them, and that's despite not having people periodically stomping around there.

And not just that, but you expect people to go out doing this even though it involves having to go mountaineering (without trails) through brush in South Indian heat with a pack full of manure and seeds on their backs. (And they wouldn't be giving them ultralight gear here or anything. It's gonna be a burlap sack if you're lucky, but plastic bags are more likely).

>Again, you seem to just have this unbelievably destructive model of the environmental impact of some people walking around

You seem to have a very naive model of the kind of impact that people operating in fragile wilderness has. Grass is one of the hardiest and stubborn plants out there and even that gets trampled into dirt with surprisingly few people going over it. You said animals have to function in forests too, yeah they do. But if their population isn't [kept in check by predation](http://www.yellowstonepark.com/wolf-reintroduction-changes-e...) they also do a lot of damage to the ecology. A forest isn't just a bunch of trees close together. It's a whole biome you have to build and it's not going to be helped if it's being trammeled by people, even if those people are dropping a backpack's worth of seeds with each trip. One pack of seeds won't make up for the damage they'll do just by being there unless they're extremely attentive to the principle of leaving no trace. (And believe me when I say that underpaid, uneducated random people off the street in India will not be).

And we need to go over again, since you don't seem to be getting it, the fact that we're not talking about a healthy or robust ecosystem here. We're talking about an area that has already been destroyed which they are trying to re-forest.