Dr. Rajwant Singh

Dr. Rajwant Singh is a Sikh community leader in the United States who works from the Washington DC area. He is a living public figure, and everything below is about his public roles, sourced to the organisations' own reporting and to news coverage.

The Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology lists him as the founder and president of EcoSikh, a co-founder of the National Sikh Campaign, chairman of the Sikh Council on Religion and Education (SCORE), communications director of the Sikh Human Development Foundation and secretary of the Guru Gobind Singh Foundation. It credits him with the writings "Environmental Theology in Sikhism" and "Sikhism and Caring for the Environment in Practice." Wikipedia names him as founder and Global President of EcoSikh, and Indiaspora says he co-founded EcoSikh in Washington, D.C.

EcoSikh and the Guru Nanak Sacred Forests

• 2009: EcoSikh was established through a partnership with SCORE, influenced by the United Nations Development Programme and the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (Wikipedia, citing Prill 2014).
• 2011: EcoSikh established Sikh Environment Day, held on 14 March.
• 2019: the Guru Nanak Sacred Forests campaign began around the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev Ji, using the Japanese Miyawaki method of dense planting of native trees, with 550 trees in each Indian forest.
• 20 March 2022: Singh announced 400 forests in India and elsewhere, in Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Delhi, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Jammu, and in Ireland, Derbyshire and Surrey, Canada. He said all the trees planted were surviving; the Tribune report gave no data to check this.
• EcoSikh's own later figures, as cited by Wikipedia, are over 850 forests in Punjab by 2024 and 1,580 forests in multiple states of India by March 2026. These are the organisation's counts.

After the Oak Creek shooting of 5 August 2012, in which a gunman killed six worshippers at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, Singh, as chairman of SCORE, told Religion News Service ahead of its first anniversary that many Sikhs had come out stronger because they felt their community needed them.

He is remembered for taking Sikh environmental work from the Washington gurdwara circle to Punjab's fields and gurdwaras, and as a voice of the US Sikh community after Oak Creek.