Tree protection or tree destruction panel?
HYDERABAD: As 4,000 more trees in the city get ready to face the axe, the tree protection committee constituted in 2008 after a prolonged campaign by The Times of India to check such green murders, continues to remain a silent onlooker.
Apart from “requesting” defence officials to translocate a few trees (if possible) and plant some saplings against those chopped to make way for the officers’ accommodation, the toothless committee clearly seems incapable of doing anything to check the felling. Interestingly, when asked about it, a key member of the body, V B J Chelikani Rao said: “We were not appointed to cause obstructions for projects that are necessary.”
At present, the defunct committee has on board about eight members. The list includes: Ramana Reddy, conservator of forests (CF, Hyderabad circle); P Rajender Reddy, director of urban forestry, Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority (HMDA); P V Raja Rao, divisional forest officer (DFO, Hyderabad); G D Priyadarshini, additional commissioner, Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC), M Veda Kumar of Forum for a Better Hyderabad (FBH); V B J Chelikani Rao of United Federation of Residents’ Welfare Associations (UFRWA), Farida Tampal of World Wildlife Foundation-India (WWF), along with a representative of the roads and buildings department.
This exhaustive list comprising fairly known citizen activists notwithstanding, the committee exists only on paper. In its three-year run the body has failed to check most green massacres in the city. The recent being the 250 trees felled on the ESI hospital campus in June this year. While the committee had then claimed that it had issued strict orders to the authorities to compensate the loss by planting an equal number of saplings, four months on nothing has been done about it. “The process has been delayed, but they will surely do the needful,” said a member of the tree protection committee in his defence.
Meanwhile, the committee’s latest ruling in favour of defence officials has attracted severe criticism from city environmentalists. They claim that the members have cleared the axing of 4,000 trees without studying the issue in depth. In fact they even say that most members have little understanding of trees and are not suitable to be on the panel.
“The members have suggested translocation, which is absolutely absurd as most of the trees in this belt are pollution-controlling trees. They do not have the capability of surviving a translocation.” said Sarvottam Rao, retired forester and city’s best known environmentalist. Rao added, “Only coppicing trees (that grow shoots even when cut from the stump) like teak, babul and peepal can be translocated, not these that have been proposed by the committee.”
Sources from the forest department attribute this poor performance of the committee to the lack of importance given to it by the authorities. They say the body is rarely allowed to take an independent decision and are not even taken on field visits for inspection. “They do not have regular meetings, no member is aware of who all comprise the committee and more often then not they do even know about the requests (for tree felling) that come to the forest department. How are they going to function effectively in such a scenario?” asked a senior official of the department.
With some members of the tree protection committee admitting to these claims, dissolving the body for good seems like the only way forward.