Last week, a 20-minute thunderstorm in Delhi uprooted many trees, some of them between 40 and 50 years old, throwing the city out of gear for hours. This chaos has become a pattern whenever a pre-monsoon storm, with high-velocity winds, hits the city. But the problem is serious enough for the Delhi High Court to take note of the callous urban planning that causes these venerable old trees, which provide the polluted city its vital green lungs, to lose their moorings. As the court rightly pointed out, the growing concretisation of the city, without providing trees sufficient breathing space around their trunks, causes their roots to dry out and make them vulnerable to the elements. Though the Delhi government has resolved to plant trees to make up for the losses, this exercise does not adequately compensate for the huge biodiversity destruction that accompanies each fallen tree in terms not just of flora but also the birds and insects that have inhabited them for decades.
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First Published: Sun, June 05 2022. 21:47 IST