Deccan Chronicle 04.09.2009
Concrete jungle gobbles up green
Chennai, Sept. 2: The green cover in Chennai is shrinking due to urbanisation and development projects.
According to environmentalists, open space has come down by 60.2 per cent which means greenery is slowly vanishing as industrialisation, including the one caused by software industry’s demand for space, is slowly gobbling up lung space.
“Chennai city has only about two percent of the area as declared parks. In Chennai Metropolitan Area (CMA), the declared forest cover is about 24 sq kms, which is about 2 per cent of the CMA,” says the second master plan of the Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority. There are only 20,000 healthy trees within the Chennai corporation limit.
Forest officials and environmentalists say the green cover has shrunk in the last 35 years. “Earlier, trees were felled to promote real estate within the city. Now, it is repeated in all the suburbs where urban development is happening very fast. Trees become the first casualties when it comes to road expansion and other development projects,” say environmentalists.
“The tree cover in the city is inadequate and has to be enhanced by at least another 50 per cent. This will help us address several environmental issues, including pollution and rising temperature levels,” say forest department officials who are also working towards increasing the green cover.
According to them, awareness levels among Chennaiites to save trees and promote greenery are very low. “It is very pathetic. Every resident of the city should take the responsibility of promoting greenery. None of us do it,” Ms Shobha Menon, a trustee of Nizhal, an NGO that speaks for trees, says.
Every normal adult in the city would require about 1,30,000 litres of oxygen every year and two healthy trees can provide this. So, for a city of six million people, the green cover has to be definitely improved and this is not just in the hands of the government.
