The BMC’s Garden department has undertaken a special campaign, ‘Vruksha Sanjeevani Abhiyan,’ to preserve trees’ health, especially roadside trees. Under the campaign, the officials will remove nails, ad hoardings, banners, electric wires and other items hung on tree trunks. The staff will also deconcretise the area around tree roots and fill it with red soil to enhance the trees’ growth. The campaign began on Monday, April 15 and will continue until April 30 across 24 civic wards.
Mumbai has around 29.75 lakh trees, however, many roadside trees are damaged by citizens by hanging items on tree trunks, nailing, pasting posters, covering trunks with power cables and so on, thereby damaging the full-grown healthy trees.
BMC’s actions on Monday, day 1 of the campaign | Image accessed by FPJ
This is the second such campaign undertaken by the civic garden department. The last campaign was undertaken in 2022, when nails weighing as much as 124 kgs were removed from tree trunks and 2243 posters were removed, displaying the severity of the problem. As per the data provided by the garden department, nails/posters and cables were removed from 10449 trees and 1906 trees were deconcretised.
A senior officer from BMC garden department said that the campaign is undertaken at the ward level by the Assistant Superintendent of Gardens. Help from local NGOs will also be sought. BMC expects that in this year’s campaign, the violations would be less than 2022 due to awareness programs and recent actions taken against violators.
