Shrinking open spaces in Jalandhar leave no room for green lungs
Tribune News Service
Jalandhar, July 19
As the monsoon season has already started, various NGOs, social organisations, banks, educational institutes and corporate companies have started mass plantation drives. But the moot question for all of them is where to grow the trees.
We even decided to move to the outer areas of the city such as Sofi village near Jalandhar Cantonment and Khusro village in the absence of space for growing trees. But there is always an issue of watering the saplings after plantation. We had to assign the duty to some residents and continuously call them to remind them to water the plants every morning and evening.
The city, which is fast converting into a concrete jungle, only has roadsides, strips along canals and some parks and edges of school playgrounds where plantation is possible. With commercial buildings and malls dotting the roads, highways getting widened to adjust higher vehicular traffic and even internal roads getting paved end to end, even this space is getting shrinked in the city areas.
Even most houses are bereft of adequate lawn space as people have been covering the front and backyards fully with even the Municipal Corporation not taking any action against the owners. It is common to see residents now realising the need to plant trees and fulfilling this desire by using huge drums for plantation.
Pawan Bassi of SBI Bank said, “When we recently started our plantation drive, we did it in some schools and parks. But then, we realised that there were hardly other options. So, we, along with our regional manager Pardeep Kumar decided that to head towards villages. We are now procuring and handing over 100 plants to schools in each village so as to carry on the drive.”
Similarly, social activist Harleen Kaur also said she was even facing issues in finding proper spaces in the city. “We too decided to move to the outer areas of the city such as Sofi village near Jalandhar Cantonment and Khusro village. But there is always an issue of watering the saplings after plantation. We have had to assign the duty to some residents and continuously call them to remind them of watering the plants every morning and evening,” she said.
The forest officials said it was just to meet the space issues that they had started promoting agro-forestry, urging farmers to plant trees in their agricultural lands. The department is giving Rs 14 as an incentive for plantation of each tree in the forest areas.
Despite such issues, the forests officials claim that the forest cover has increased recently in the region owing to large plantation drives carried out on the occasion of the 550th Parkash Purb of Guru Nanak Dev when 76 lakh trees were planted all across the state and on the 400th Gurpurab of Guru Teg Bahadur when 66 lakh trees got planted. The officials say that the survival rate of these trees was 75 per cent and at all gaps thus created trees were being planted again now. Forests Minister Sadhu Singh Dharamsot had recently claimed that the area under forests had increased by 11.63 sq km since the past one year.
The forest officials said: “We have also set up 432 Nanak Bagichis and 29 Miyawaki forest areas in the state, with some in Jalandhar and periphery too.”
