FEATURE
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The smothering green
Source: Toxics Link, Date: , 2014
The swathe of green canopies
and wilderness which soothed the city in the scorching summers, the green
foliage which appended the ecstatic beauty of the city, the green lungs which
purified the noxious air, the Delhi ridge which once stood as an exemplary dense
woodland and a habitat to innumerable birds, species and insects, stands
precariously endangered today. Entrapped in a hapless twirl of fate, the city
today is a taciturn witness to the conflict between what once stood as a green
city to what is becoming a concrete.
Delhi lauds at being one of the
greenest capital cities across the world and the Forest Department explicitly
claims that Delhi’s green cover has doubled in a decade from 151 sq km in 2001
to 296 sq km in 2011, with the efforts on for maintaining it. Much to the dismay,
the city is rather an onlooker to dwindling trees and the green canopies. Delhi
has transformed from being the green capital to being a concrete jungle in less
than a decade. Even the City’s natural Heritage – The Delhi Ridge is being slaughtered
at the altar of the much deemed development projects and initiatives.
Delhi today is exploding into a
megacity with leaping strides. Increasing
population demands, development & urbanization is posing pressure on the
green cover. With Development and infrastructure projects, construction
activities, roads, fly-overs, metros and shopping malls, transport corridors,
taking precedence; the trees are
increasingly falling prey to the unbridled urbanization unfolding across the
city. With development projects comes chopping, felling and tiling of trees
thus choking it. With marketing comes nailing of trees with advertisements and
with winters comes the clamor over ruthless pruning of trees. Concretization and tiling around trees to
make pavements limits the surface soil for trees to grow & thus weakens
their root system. The problem is also abounded by strangulating trees by Metal
tree guards etc.
The
only green forest of Delhi- the Ridge has shrunk to little pockets. The Ridge
is being swallowed in chunks; encroachment is becoming rife on behest of the
powerful commercial lobbies and those in the authority. The custodians
themselves are eagle eying the ridge for various infrastructure projects. The area is being lost to magnificent farmhouses
and sprawling bungalows, schools, places of worship, petrol pumps, hotel
complexes ,widening of roads and metro tracks.
Despite the presence of an
array of authorities; their initiatives and the guardians of forests like the Tree
Authority; The Ministry of Environment and Forest; Horticulture Departments and
the various greening plans, Delhi is heading towards becoming a merely treeless
landscape. The city today is a silent spectator to the intensifying menace and gratuitous
destruction. There is a need to provide some space to the wheezing green lungs
of Delhi. Development is vital but what is required is sustainable development rather
than mindless development which is plaguing our planet today. We need to
understand, the price at which these developments are being served on our platter.
--Prashanti
Tiwari
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