Privacy Policy

1Who we are

TREE Innovative Foundation ("TREEI", "we", "us") is a Section 8 social enterprise registered in India, with its office at 201, Needa Appt, Near Power House, Rasta Peth, Pune 411011, Maharashtra. Our website is treei.org.

This policy explains what personal information we collect, why, how we protect it and the choices you have. It covers our website, the TREEI portal used by our team and partners, our email and WhatsApp communication (including Vikrant, our AI operations assistant), and our programmes.

2Information we collect

Information you give us

• When you contact us: your name, email, phone number and message.
• When you donate: your name, contact details, address and PAN where needed to issue an 80G receipt, and the payment reference. Online payments are handled by Razorpay; we do not see or store your card, UPI or bank login details. If you give by bank transfer or UPI, you send us your name, PAN and the transfer reference by email so we can issue your receipt.
• When you apply for a job, fellowship or volunteering role: the details in your application.
• When you work with us as a partner, vendor or CSR contact: your name, organisation, role and contact details.

Information about our team

• For people who work with TREEI and use the portal: profile details, attendance, leave, tasks and reports, and the payroll and bank details needed to pay salaries.

Information from our programmes

• In our field programmes we may record information such as household details, attendance, survey answers and photos. We collect it with the consent of the participants, or of a parent or guardian for children, and use it only to deliver and report on that programme.

Messages

• When you email or WhatsApp TREEI, including Vikrant: your email address or phone number, the name shown on your account, the content of your messages and their delivery status.

Website

• Basic technical information needed for the website to work, such as your browser type and pages visited. We use Google Analytics (through Google Tag Manager) to understand how visitors use the site. It uses cookies and records things like pages visited, device type and approximate location; it does not tell us who you are. You can block or delete these cookies in your browser settings.
• The map on our Contact page is provided by Google Maps, which may set its own cookies when the map loads.

3How we use it

• To run our programmes and report on their results.
• To reply to your messages and keep in touch about work you are involved in.
• To organise our team's work: daily work plans, reminders, approvals and follow-ups.
• To issue donation receipts and meet our legal obligations, including income-tax (12A and 80G) and audit requirements.
• To report to our funders and CSR partners, using totals or anonymised data unless you have agreed otherwise.
• To keep our systems and the people we work with safe.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not use it for advertising.

4Vikrant, our AI operations assistant

Vikrant is an AI system run by TREEI. It sends work plans, reminders and updates to the TREEI team by email and WhatsApp, reads replies to those messages, and prepares information for TREEI's management. Vikrant runs on TREEI's own server. To understand and write messages it uses an AI service from Anthropic (Claude). Bank account numbers, PAN, Aadhaar, passwords and similar details are removed before any information is sent to that service.

Decisions on approvals, payments and employment matters are always taken by a person at TREEI, not by Vikrant. Messages from numbers Vikrant does not recognise are passed to TREEI's management and are not answered automatically.

You can ask us at any time to stop receiving WhatsApp messages from Vikrant: reply STOP, or write to us at the address below.

5Who we share it with

We share personal information only when it is needed, and only with:

• Service providers that work for us: Google Workspace (email and calendar), Google Analytics (website statistics), Meta (WhatsApp Business Platform), Cloudflare (secure access to our systems), Anthropic (AI processing for Vikrant), Google Maps (the map on our Contact page), Hostinger (website hosting) and Razorpay (online donations).
• Funders and CSR partners: programme reports, using totals or anonymised data, or with consent (for example, for photos and stories).
• Government authorities, when the law requires it.

Some of these providers store data in data centres outside India. We choose providers that protect personal data to a high standard.

6How we protect and keep it

TREEI's own systems run on a server we control in Pune, behind secure access. Only the people who need information for their work can see it, and information is encrypted when it travels over the internet.

We keep information only as long as we need it for the purpose it was collected, or as long as the law requires (for example, donation records under income-tax rules). Vikrant's copies of email and WhatsApp messages are deleted after 6 months.

7Your rights

Under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, you can ask us to:

• tell you what personal information we hold about you and how we use it;
• correct or update it;
• delete it, where we do not need to keep it by law;
• withdraw a consent you have given.

You can also raise a grievance with us, and if you are not satisfied with our reply, with the Data Protection Board of India.

8Children

Information about children in our programmes is collected only with the consent of a parent or guardian and is used only for that programme. Our website is not directed at children.

9Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, we will post the new version on this page with a new date.

10Contact us

For any question, request or grievance about your personal information, contact: