News: Gurugram: Green cover thinning but plantations for infrastructure projects stuck, some since 2010-10-06-2022
GURUGRAM: The city's green cover has been dwindling by the year as trees make way for important urban infrastructure projects, but unavailability of land has held up compensatory afforestation, till as long back as 2010.
The forest department has to plant 2 lakh trees to make up for the city's green losses in the last 12 years.
These drives are mandatory under the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA) whenever forest land is given to carry out development work such as construction of industries and roads. The scheme, introduced by the central government in 2004, is critical for a project’s green clearance. More importantly, it is meant to help sustain the percentage of green cover in areas that are rapidly being concretised and make up for ecological damages.
While plantation drives have been held up, data from the Forest Survey of India (FSI) shows gurugram lost 2.47 square km of forest cover in just one year between 2019 and 2020.
In 2018, around 10,000 trees were chopped down to widen Sohna Road. One lakh trees were supposed to be planted in compensatory afforestation, but that has not happened.
“We are trying to complete pending afforestation drives. We have cleared out the smaller ones, but around 2 lakh trees are yet to be planted,” Rajeev Tajyan, Gurugram’s divisional forest officer (DFO), said on Thursday.
He attributed the backlog to unavailability of requisite stretches of land in the city. “The land on which afforestation is to take place should have 40% or more degraded forest cover. Earlier, compensatory afforestation used to be carried out along roads, but that is not the case now after it was observed that these plants and trees were felled for expansion of the routes,” the divisional forest officer said.
The district is also losing more forest cover, with work on the 46km-gurugram-Rewari highway having begun. With no land in gurugram, officials are planning to account for this green cover loss — of 14,000 trees — by planting 1.5 lakh more by next year. But the options are in far-off areas, like Morni-Pinjore in Panchkula district, Vivek Saxena, the CEO of CAMPA, Haryana, said.
Environmentalists have called for a relook at the compensatory afforestation policy, pointing to obvious flaws in it that don’t address the basic question of replenishment of greenery in the place that’s losing it. Morni-Pinjore is 290km from Gurugram.
“How can chopping down green patches in gurugram and then planting trees in Panchkula help the ecosystem? This cannot be the solution to damaging forest land,” said Vaishali Rana Chandra, a city-based environmental activist.
The thinning green cover of gurugram also means an adverse impact on air quality in Delhi-NCR, which breathes heavily polluted air throughout the year.
“The district needs to increase its green cover to tackle this issue instead of diverting the remaining forest land to development work or planting trees in other districts of the state,” said Shubhansh Tiwari, a research associate at the Amity Center for Air Pollution Control.
Union environment ministry norms state that 1,100 trees/plants can be grown in one hectare of land under the compensatory afforestation scheme. Environmentalists told TOI the Haryana government often plants larger and taller trees, which need a lot more land to grow than the area notified under the rules.
“In south Haryana, for instance, the survival rate of saplings is very low. This is because the 1,100 plants-per-hectare space is not adequate for larger trees,” said RP Balwan, former conservator of forests who was a member of a panel formed by a Supreme Court-appointed committee for delineation of the Aravalis in 2009.
“All roads need not be widened because traffic has increased. We cannot keep doing this. Eventually, we will need to strengthen the public transport system, and reduce the number of vehicles on roads. That would also allow us to keep more green belts and limit concretisation in urban areas,” said Col SS Oberoi (retd), an environmentalist.
