Where’s the ‘garden’ in the Garden City?

In April 2008, an anticorruption NGO called on the Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike to stop hacking down trees in the city under the pretext of development. But nearly four years later, there has been no visible change in the BBMP’s incessant destruction of the city’s greenery, which it seems, is at least partly driven by greed.

In an open letter to then BBMP Commissioner S. Subramanya, the chairman of Transparency International India (TII), M.F. Saldanha, a former Mumbai High Court justice, pointed out that the city’s greenery had been reduced from 15 percent in 2000 to 8 percent in 2008 with the felling of over 19,000 trees. With the large number of road-widening projects that have begun since then, it is obvious that that figure has shrunk considerably.

Timber from each tree that is cut down is worth between Rs. 300,000 and Rs. 500,000, but contractors purchase them for a measly Rs. 2,000 to Rs. 3,000. TII believes that BBMP officials sell the timber and pocket the huge profits, which motivates them to carry on their merciless destruction of the city’s trees.

Though much of this relentless tree-felling ostensibly has been done to widen roads to improve the flow of traffic, little or no difference has been made in that regard, and the city has lost thousands of trees in the process.

The BBMP fails to realize the importance of striking a balance between what it believes is “development” and the ecological requirements of the city. Sacred trees like the peepal, economically  significant trees like sandal, teak and pongamia as well as exotic ones with large canopies that provide shade and help reduce pollution have been chopped down for road-widening projects.

The Karnataka Preservation of Trees Act of 1976 made it mandatory for both local people and civic bodies to get permission from the Karnataka Forest Department before felling trees. But the passage of this act has done little to prevent the large-scale felling of trees. The Forest Department seems to have turned a blind eye toward the BBMP’s war on the city’s trees.

The city is fast turning into a concrete jungle, and the effects of this are unpleasantly evident in the climatic change that Bangalore is experiencing. Commuters need to bear the scorching summer heat without the shade that trees once provided.

In November 2011, in a case that the BBMP won, nearly 5,000 residents in Malleshwaram and Yeshwanthpur protested against the cutting of the last two of the 19 trees on either side of Sankey Tank Road. In this proposed project to widen the traffic corridor to Yeshwanthpur, the BBMP was asked to plant saplings to compensate for the trees that will be lost in the process. But there reportedly are no records of where the saplings that the Forest Department is adamant it gave to the BBMP have been planted.

Road-widening projects have faced strong opposition from the citizens of Bangalore, who have protested loudly against such unthinking destruction of trees across the city.

In spite of promises to restore the city’s greenery, with the current state of affairs and the BBMP’s indifference toward the issue, it seems certain that urban deforestation will continue apace.

Originally published in The SoftCopy