City heading to bury ‘Second Greenest’ tag
| Date :25-Apr-2019 |
By Vijay Phanshikar:
The city of Nagpur appears headed to a point when it will no longer be able to claim to be the country’s “Second Greenest City”, perhaps after Bengaluru. Its civic and political leaders seem perpetually engaged in the task of denuding the city of its wonderful green arboreal cover by engaging in a willful neglect of its trees that once offered wonderful, cool shade even at the peak of summers. They appear committed to making efforts to choke the trees along the roads, and then wait for the funeral moment of their ‘collapse’ out of lack of water and air to the roots.
The city must be having countless thousands of such trees, gasping for breath, thirsting for some water -- which do not reach the roots simply because the civic authorities have not bothered to keep the tree-bases cleared of the filth that includes cement and plastic and everything that a civil society should have discarded long ago. The Robin Cook novel “Fatal Cure” has an ugly episode when the doctors administer certain medicine to a critically ill patient in what can be called an unofficial euthanasia to lead him to a slow but sure death. The city’s leadership seems engaged in such an act.
Of course, there is a lone official voice -- that of Nagpur’s Municipal Commissioner Abhijeet Bangar -- to have asked all the municipal zonal offices to clear the tree bases in their respective areas before May 23, 2019. He felt disturbed by the process and issued an official directive in this regard. This honourable exception apart, the city’s collective leadership working across the operational spectrum appears committed to ensuring that each tree scorches and suffocates to death in times to come, not too distant in the future.
Newspapers, social and environmental activists as well as common citizens have often felt the stabs of pain in their chests as this casualness haunts the city’s green cover. But all their grief seems to have little value in the consideration of the officialdom and political leadership of the Second Capital of Maharashtra. Very soon, therefore, the city will rob itself of the honorific of the country’s “Second Greenest City” sooner than later, ‘The Hitavada’ suspects. Those siding with the official neglect of the trees may try to brand this as a doomsday statement by a newspaper. Yet, facts are absolutely vocal about the funeral reality, the evidence of which is available by roadside all over Nagpur.
As a newspaper, ‘The Hitavada’ has campaigned variously in the city’s best interest. This is also one more effort to alert not just the people but also the collective leadership about an impending danger that may be disastrous for all of us. The people in charge of making roads and pavements and intersections are the actual culprits of this sin. Each of the pictures we present here will speak for itself in more than a thousand words. In a normal situation, after having done that, a newspaper will tend to say, “We have done our work, and now leave things to the people and the authorities”. However, we do not wish to leave this task at that. We propose to keep pushing the authorities until they relent to wisdom.