While the world is celebrating Earth Day with sustainable and equitable practices, Mumbai sees deforestation, confiscation of adivasis’ livelihood, setting up of a car shed in a forest which is a highly polluting industry, destruction of flood plains of Mithi river and concretization of the forest. Early morning today, MMRCL is back at its best of ruthlessly cutting down trees in Aarey. There is no judiciary, governance, policy or manifesto to protect the only surviving urban forest in the world. The efforts of conscious citizens and environmentalists have so far delayed the destruction of the forest but when the judiciary lets the perpetrators of crime go with a meagre fine (which goes from exchequers), the forest is left sweating for its future just like the Mumbaikars.
Supreme Court on Monday permitted Mumbai Metro to remove 177 trees from Aarey forest for a shunting area for Metro-3 trains in Mumbai's Aarey Colony. The number, however, is considered an undercount. Environmentalists and Adivasis living near the project site say that the total number of "unnumbered" trees is between 90 and 100, which have not been given permission to be felled. The Supreme Court has criticised MMRCL for its attempts to "overreach" its orders and imposed a fine of INR10 lakh on the company.
A large number of police are deployed at the site of tree felling. No citizens are allowed to enter the place. The land where tree felling is going on, belongs to 73 Adivasi Budhiya Bhoye. These trees belonged to their ancestors and were a part of their family and supported their livelihood. Many questions remain unanswered at this recent tree felling event:
1. Is the tree officer present at the site ensuring that only the labelled trees with numbers are cut? There are many huge trees without numbers present at the site which shouldn’t be cut.
2. Is some officer checking the exact number of trees that are being felled?
3. How are the officials going to compensate the adivasis for their lost livelihood?
4. How are they going to compensate for the loss of habitat for birds, leopards, insects, and millions of creatures that were supported by the trees?
5. Out of 177 trees, 53 will be transplanted and 124 will be cut down permanently. Who decides and on what basis are the tree transplantation number and statistics decided? Are there any details about the site of transplantation? Can there be not any saviour mechanism for 124 trees in terms of transplantation or translocation?
6. Is there a committee or panel to supervise the transplantation? BMC and MMRCL have a very poor history of tree transplantation drives. The BMC’s tree authority permitted the felling of 25,018 trees between 2010 and 2016, revealed a right-to-information (RTI) response. However, it failed to provide records for the number of trees replanted or transplanted in their stead over seven years.
MMRC has not been able to save most of the trees affected by the metro rail. The Bombay high court-appointed committee remarked that the Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation (MMRC) has not carried out the transplantation of trees affected by the Metro-3 project efficiently, that many transplanted trees did not show signs of sprouting, while the metro rail body has also delayed geo-tagging the affected trees, as recommended by the committee. It slammed MMRC for not using modern machines to transplant trees. It noted that more than 50 per cent of the trees did not survive.
https://www.asianage.com/metros/mumbai/140219/most-metro-hit-trees-dead-report.html
Taking care of the forest is the responsibility of the government. The way they support and consult capitalists, the government should take into consideration the locals’ and citizens’ interests and expectations instead of accusing them as anti-nationals.