Trees and the city
A small, QR code-led initiative is trying to inform visitors to Delhi’s Lodi Gardens about its trees, but is it enough? Amrita Singh finds out
When nature meets technology, you can never predict the outcome. So when I learnt that the New Delhi Municipal Council had put up QR codes, or quick response codes, on 100 tree species in the city’s historic Lodi Gardens, I decided to check it out.
QR codes, matrix barcodes that allow instant access to information, have made their way to trees before. A schoolteacher in a village in Pune, for instance, has installed chip-like sensors and labelled each tree with a barcode to protect them from illegal felling. Now, whenever someone tries to cut a tree in the village, a red alert message intimates the residents.
Taking things up a notch, 130,000 trees were planted in the form of a giant QR code in a vast field outside Xinlinshui village in China’s Hebei province. When viewed from a certain height, this tree-made QR code is scannable and allows visitors to obtain travel information since the huge, green code is linked to the local tourism WeChat account.
Delhi has its own rich history of indigenous trees that can benefit from such technology. Ber (Indian jujube), Peelu and Babool are some of Delhi’s native trees that are often obscured by the showiness of grander trees. Those such as Ashoka, which line several streets of Delhi; Maulshree, with its tiny, white flowers; and mulberry, with its succulent fruit, are some of the indigenous trees that can be seen in Lodi Gardens planted alongside exotic ones.
With the change in season, Delhi, too, changes its colours. For example, while summer witnesses the blooming of the Amaltas on Hailey Road in Central Delhi, spring brings the bright red Palash trees around the Kalkaji Mandir or the Central Delhi Ridge behind Rashtrapati Bhavan. Despite all this native beauty, filmmaker and environmentalist Pradip Krishen believes that indigenous trees are not given the respect they deserve. “The focus is on planting ornamental and exotic trees,” says the author of Trees of Delhi. In Lodi Gardens, too, despite Delhi’s rich history of indigenous trees, today you find only 25 such endemic species.
Signages on trees, limited to their botanical names in both Hindi and English, have been around for a long time at Lodi Gardens. The gardens are, in fact, dotted with informative signboards that provide details of monuments and bird species in the area. Now, with QR codes on some trees, nature enthusiasts and visitors can access information about them on their smartphones. Krishen, however, is of the view that a directory of dead information such as the origin of the tree, its common name, girth, height, growth rate or branch strength serves no purpose as this information is neither interactive nor user friendly. My own experience of scanning the QR code on a camphor laurel tree, marked as code number 000027, was unsatisfactory as it did little more than pique my curiosity and merely displayed such nuggets of information, albeit along with a beautiful picture of the tree.
“Writing labels that are engaging and easy to understand can be difficult. I hope it [Delhi’s municipal body] has found the right mix of skills to do this well,” says Krishen. So how does one convey information that is good enough to satisfy curiosity? Krishen feels the project can take off only if people are made aware of this technology through interactive tree walks.
That’s an idea worth nurturing, given how popular Delhi’s many heritage and food walks are. Last year, Delhiites gave a demo of how strongly they feel for the city’s green cover when they came out in the hundreds to protest the felling of some 16,500 trees as part of a redevelopment project. On social media, the city’s own “Chipko Movement” became popular as “Delhi Trees SOS” campaign.
An initiative like putting QR codes on trees has to be treated as only the beginning of a larger, concerted campaign to celebrate Delhi’s tree history.