HC’s slamming has little effect on civic authorities
| Date :29-Apr-2019 |
Staff Reporter:
How careless authorities can be about trees is evident from the fact that it did not respond quickly even to the order of High Court on the issue of choking of trees. Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) had submitted the affidavit with a promise to de-choke all the trees of city. But alas! After the passage of almost four months of submission of affidavit, no steps have been taken. As a result, the situation on preservation of tree front, has changed from bad to worse. Since the elected representatives were in the election mode, the officialdom turned a Nelson’s eye towards the trees gasping for breath due to mindless planning. Though Municipal Commissioner Abhijit Bangar convened a meeting and asked officials to de-choke the trees by May 23, nothing has moved hitherto. Choking of trees during the road concretisation work was a thoughtless action as is happening in other cases in city too, where stakeholders are not taken into confidence and consulted.
When the issue of any development comes to fore, no thought is given for saving the trees, which provides such a precious green cover and protect citizens from vagaries of nature. Adv Kalyani Deshpande who is an amicus curie in a suo-motu Public Interest Litigation (PIL) initiated by Nagpur bench of Bombay High Court about indiscriminate and deliberate felling of trees, alleged that trees were being killed silently. She pointed out one peculiar loophole which is being exploited to the hilt by people to cut the inconvenient trees. There are two different authorities within NMC who give permission for cutting of tree and display of hoarding. People get permission for hoarding display, cut the tree if it becomes the barrier in visibility from a distance. There is no monitoring by civic authorities on such acts. Trees in Nagpur are standing like goats at the slaughter house awaiting their turns to get killed.
Nagpur has got so obsessed by the concretisation that the authorities even forget that they do the mess of choking of trees at important places too. For example, they did the foolish act in High Court premises where they did not leave enough space around trees. Somebody brought it to the notice of High Court when the PIL on trees was being heard. Tersely worded order by the High Court compelled PWD to swung into action to de-choke the trees. The PIL was filed in the year 2018 and since then number of cases of tree-neglect kept coming before the High Court. It was initiated by then senior administrative judge of the Nagpur bench Justice Bhushan Dharmadhikari along with Justice M G Giratkar.
The bench passed order on its own motion asking NMC to take immediate measures for de-choking of trees. As usual, the NMC did file affidavit but HC expressed its unhappiness on it slamming the civic authorities that whenever trees were being damaged naturally or artificially, it was their duty to revive it and support it. But the efforts were missing. Going further, the High Court had asked NMC to place on record the name of engineers, architects and contractors with their license numbers. Adv Deshpande revealed that no such details were furnished by the authorities.
To add to their sheer act of negligence, there is no mechanism decided in the meeting convened by Bangar and attended by all the Assistant Commissioners of zones along with Executive Engineers, Chief Engineer of PWD, Superintendent Engineer of NMC as to how the trees should be de-choked. For example, ‘The Hitavada’ had published a photo where the tree waiting for its premature burial between the two paver blocks is visible. The engineers have no idea about de-choking of such trees. Secondly, no space has remained for plantation of trees by side of the roads. No plantation is possible as entire surface is either cemented or then paved. The cementing or pavement actually touches stem of the tree. Number of big trees is dwindling and the type of plantation adopted reveals that those trees will not reach the height or age achieved by old trees.