A park to park the orphaned trees

There is no dearth of charity for building temples, orphanages, old-age homes, destitute homes or for the armies of die-hard animal rights activists. However, the far more important members of our urban environment - the oxygen generators which let  us breathe freely - have been completely neglected.

This is not a sermon against felling of trees or to promote 'chipkos' and agitations to stop felling of trees. This is a simple appeal to all the moneybags, NGOs, activists, urban planners and architects, realtors and philanthropists - and, of course, the AMC, AUDA, the state government and all the denizens of Ahmedabad.

What about reserving a few acres of land and dedicating this land to a park which houses all the big trees from across the city, which need to be cut to pave one road, widen another, or to make space for constructions?

To put it simply, a 30-year-old neem tree outside your society or an overgrown peepal tree on the roadside can be lifted from the site and shifted, with most of its root structure intact, to this park. Once brought here, it is re-planted in a pit with root-fixing nutrients and it gets a fresh lease of life. In a couple of years it will again blossom to its old glory!

The green activists can actually play a constructive role in this by educating the local people to identify such trees and help them give the trees a new life. For realtors and the construction industry, investing in giving a new lease of life to trees will be a better bet than planting some saplings, which are usually left uncared to die soon after the photos have been taken!

To begin with, the state government or the AUDA or the AMC can provide a chunk of land for these trees. A corporate house can take it up as a CSR project by funding it. A small team of people interested in the subject and half-a-dozen unskilled employees can easily help the project take off.

Want to know more about the benefits of this project? Recently, hundreds of very old and some 'ancient' banyan trees were chopped off from the periphery of the Palace complex in Vadodara to broaden the road. These are the trees which gave 'Vatpadra' its name and even the identity.

But unfortunately instead of selling Vadodara as a Banayan Tree city, the trees were chopped off. Some of the giant trees near the Gujarat University campus on CEPT crossroads were eventually cut down, despite resistance by activists. Wooded hills lining the SG highway on Thaltej crossroads were cut to make room for a power station. Even in Junagadh, hundreds of trees which were decades old - some even a century old - were cut down to pave way for a new building on the premises of the collector's office.

This is a simple solution - which is capable of making everyone happy! Uprooting trees from a particular spot and growing them again at another place is not a difficult task at all, nor is it very expensive. Looking at the rate at which trees have been chopped in the past few years, such a park can save us from becoming an urban jungle. It will not only make Ahmedabad guilt-free, it will also make it a role-model for other cities to follow.