Saving the Greens: One Tree At a Time
Girdling of Peepul Tree raises concern amidst people
While trees across the city are facing the axe and “development” pressure and infrastructure up-gradation is taking its toll, concerned citizens are now coming out in the open to protest against the disappearing greens.
Anadish Kumar Pal (right), a resident of Pitampurais one such city-dweller who has been protesting against the pitiful way in which a Peepul tree has been girdled in his neighbourhood. He, along with three other signatories filed a general police complaint regarding the damage done to this tree, which would will surely kill the tree sooner than later.
Pal has already written to the Deputy Conservator of Forests-cum-Tree Officer, Environment Secretary and to the Chief Minister. He has also been reported to be threatened by another resident.
Click here to read the media story on the incident (Times of India)
To contact Anadish Kumar Pal and extend your support, you can get in touch with him at anadish@gmail.com or at 9868010604
Since 1996, me and my dear late father Ajit Pal started trying to save trees in our neighbourhood. Later, after our marriage, my wife Ritu joined us. It always had been a very lonely battle. Supports was always very difficult to come by, media too would occasionally highlight things in a quixotic manner and then disregard things entirely. We could never imagine entirely how society could be so apathetic to the neighbourhood trees. For us, they embodied so many of our past visions. They also my landscape I have grown fond of, as I have grown middle aged through the last 30 years. Would the Sherpas easily accept removal of Mt Everest from their neighbourhood?
However, after the passage of my dear father in 2007, I gradually find the world around me engulfed in a vertiginous tail-catching foxy dance. What are we fighting for? Dr. Jane Goodall and Dr. R. K. Pachauri have to keep traveling in jet airplanes to awaken the world about nature and conservation. Almost all our efforts seem to add to the destruction of nature as defined in classical literature. Is there something wrong with our current social values? For instance, why all our public and private buildings have to be air-conditioned? Do we ever try to inquire into the actual ‘conditioning’ that takes place in an air-conditioned space? When our frugal life style of the past changes and we are neither willing to sweat or to do manual labour, how we can expect our energy needs to go down. Even a workout for us needs electric power. So in every way we are using energy whose sources almost always destroy nature and pollute the atmosphere. Even large hydroelectric plants submerge large valleys and a lot of flora and fauna goes deep under.
I do not know if I have any significance to the world. Like so many animals, plants and trees disappearing, I would also ebb out or be killed. It would be a lesson for any future whistleblower: get murdered if you try to raise your voice when a tree is being killed surreptitiously! I tend to think now, these are the actual hidden lessons our government wants us to learn, notwithstanding all the gloss and hype of the formal consciousness building efforts. This is precisely why we will gradually lose all our tigers and our original forests; and we shall end up with artificial man-made plantations of European style. Those forests need money to maintain; that is precisely what our bureaucracy wants. Can you imagine, there is an artificial forest at Sikarpur in Delhi and the forest department plans to give a contract to the tune of 1.4 crores for the maintenance of that forest? Have you ever heard a forest needing money to live? Our politicians, our bureaucrats, our forests, all now need money to live; anybody, who tries to chronicle the hidden realities, needs to pay up and needs to be dead. That is why the BSP municipal councilor Praveen Gupta who masterminded the surreptitious destruction of the Peepul tree in our neighbourhood park at Pitampura has not only managed to put in hibernation the forest department inquiry in his misdeeds, he has on the one hand got me threatened with death because I reported the tree’s destruction and on the other instituted a civil defamation suit to the tune of Rupees 20 Lakhs against me – defaming him by letting his undercover illegal acts of tree destruction getting reported! If a man is defamed because his crime is reported, then I think it is a society not fit for citizens; it is a society designed for criminal-minded people to unite and to fight any semblance of fairness in deeds and words.