The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Struggling to retain green quotient

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Wednesday, May 14, 2008
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Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

Struggling to retain green quotient

Deepa Kurup

— Photo: K. Murali Kumar

Who cares: Avenue trees play a greater role in controlling heat values than parks and we are not doing enough to replant them.

Bangalore: Even as Bangalore is being defoliated to morph into Silicon City, the original Garden City struggles to retain its green quotient amidst indiscriminate expansion.

“It was seeded by English ambitions at the turn of the 18th Century, ambitions that turned out more lasting, pervasive and extensive in the cultivations of its landscape than meets the eye,” write Anuradha Mathur and Dilip Da Cunha in their book Deccan Traverses. The book documents concerted efforts of colonialists, who shipped exotic plants from Europe, which set Bangalore on its trajectory to becoming the Garden City. What started with Lalbagh as an “intermediary depot” to acclimatise these imported exotic species to the climate in the rest of India, grew into a full-fledged horticultural exercise which extended into town planning. This would enforce the separation of the urban from the rural by enclosing the former with a green belt, the book says.

With the beautiful boulevards on Mahatma Gandhi Road and Jayanagar giving way to the high-speed metro rail on the ground and elevated tracks in the sky, the city will soon be a but degraded shadow of its green glorious past. The avenue-lined roads, which host a variety of life forms besides providing shade and livelihood to those living around them, will soon be denuded.

Recent studies say that avenue trees play a greater role in controlling heat values than parks. It is logical: less shade means fewer pedestrians, more vehicles, more pollution and rising mercury levels.

Though replanting exercises may attempt to fill the gap, experts say that the success rates are alarmingly low. Former forest official S.G. Neginhal, who helped plant 1.5 million trees 25 years ago, says that it is gratifying to see the trees harbour several bird species today. “But all that will go once they start massive road widening. When large Ficus trees are cut, parakeets and owls which nest in them will leave,” he explains.

Native species

While replanting efforts are well-intentioned, little thought is given to retaining native species. Ajith Kumar of Wildlife Conservation Society says: “Many of the trees planted such as Ficus benjamina (java fig) have no value to birds or mammals. Pretty looking and exotic varieties like tabebuia and jacaranda are preferred over native ones like mango or guava. This probably also explains the extremely low success rate of replanting.

Places such as the University of Agricultural Sciences and the Institute of Wood Sciences campus still retain substantial patches of natural forest. With GKVK campus planning a farmer’s hostel, Stem Cell Research Institute and a stadium among other expansion proposals, experts fear that species such as the slender loris or the large bats —called flying foxes — will disappear altogether.

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