Without proper audit, conflicting claims abound in Allahabad district
ALLAHABAD: There is no proper green audit to collect details of the exact number of saplings that actually survived in Allahabad district post plantation in the past, officials and activists have said.
This situation has arisen due to a lack of proper audit of the department’s plantation drives.
As part of the initiative to plant 5 crore saplings in a single day in Uttar Pradesh in July 2016, 6.50 lakh saplings were planted in the district’s 20 development blocks besides the city area, official records said.
The budgetary allocation for achieving the record plantation in district was Rs 50 lakh and 300 trenches were dug up for the mega exercise at 104 different locations in the district.
During the ‘Haritma’ week, 1.11 lakh saplings were planted
on the banks of the Ganga in Phulpur tehsil, particularly Kanihar village. Large-scale plantation has been carried out in the village in the past too.
Any query on success of the plantation drive results in the forest officials pointing towards Kanihar where saplings have already started growing into trees, courtesy drives of the past
three years.
A visit to Kanihar shows the positive results of the planted trees. Sections where the saplings were planted are protected by a barbed wire fence. The saplings are watered regularly.
“The trees are watered by forest department people during the summers off and on, but otherwise are rarely cared for,” said a villager not wishing to be named.
Areas like Shankargarh and Koraon, where water scarcity is a perennial problem, pose a challenge that is rarely met. The situation is similar even inside the city, where ongoing development works have led to hundreds of trees being chopped down. Divisional forest officer YP Shukla said roughly 70% was the survival rate of saplings in Allahabad.
“We carry out sampling in different areas to assess the survival rate. Checking and counting each and every sapling is not possible. But results are evident in Kanihar village, besides other places in the district,” he said.
Manoj Srivastava, director of the environmental organisation Global Greens, says, “Not more than 50% saplings survive. The department does not have a proper audit to assess the survival rate.”