Even before its verdict, the Supreme Court of India has already a precedent of sorts by giving an environment-versus-development case from West Bengal an unprecedented level of deliberation.
The Supreme Court of India faced a tough question last year: Should it allow a railway over bridge (RoB), which saves human lives, but costs felling of several 100-plus-year-old heritage trees? It was argued that human lives assume precedence over trees. Although the issue at the surface looked simple, a closer look revealed an extremely complex developmental challenge. A bench headed by Chief Justice S.A. Bobde sensed it and appointed on January 9 last year an expert committee to examine issues of loss of trees and explore alternatives to the proposed felling of heritage trees that are invaluable.
The committee pointed out that felling of 356 trees for construction of 5 RoBs on NH 35 in West Bengal, in a larger perspective is a complex issue, which entails environmental management and its relationship with human development. The expert committee comprises Soham Pandya, Nishikant Mukarji, Sunita Narain, Bikas Kumar Maji and Niranjita Mitra. The Association for Protection of Democratic Rights (APDR) moved the top court against tree felling for the project.
The committee emphasised that indiscriminate tree felling cannot be justified as development, instead suggested measures to create both economic and environmental wealth. According to a Ministry of Environment and Forests circular, if a road length is less than 100 Km, there is no need to get EIA from any government agency. “Such argument, in present case, is an attempt to circumvent the law of the land. We feel deriving such conclusion is erroneous and needs rethinking on the part of implementing agency (West Bengal),” said the committee.
The committee said the current compensatory afforestation policy is not sufficient to protect the environment. “To compensate for the trees that are cut, the present policy norm is that 5 trees are planted to compensate for the cut tree. This policy actually begs the issue. There is obviously no equivalence between a 100-year-old tree and fresh sapling,” said the committee in a report.
The committee recommended that given this enormous imbalance, the effort should be to achieve as fast as possible, the original lead area index (LAI), which has been lost with the cut tree.
A majority in the committee concluded that 10 saplings should be planted to compensate for a tree with a small crown size; 25 saplings for a tree of medium crown size and 50 saplings for a tree with a large crown size. “There is enough land available for this measure to be successful and land is not a constraint,” said the report.
The committee pointed out that the compensatory planting often fails in the absence of an accountable mechanism to protect and nurture the newly planted saplings. It recommended organisational structure within the project organisation to be made accountable. The experts reckoned that the tree should be nurtured for at least 10 years against the existing 2 years and compensatory planting should begin parallelly with the project.
This project is a part of a mega project outlined by Ministry of Road Transport and Highways in which 208 RoBs are to be constructed in 19 different states of the country with Rs 20,800 crore. Out of these 22 RoBs were identified in West Bengal. The case is related to 5 RoBs where 356 trees are to be cut to implement the project and no environmental impact assessment (EIA) has been done in this project, which covers 59 Km (Barasat to Bongaon)
The committee also calculated that total cost of a tree per year, which is Rs 74,500. This means that 300 trees if allowed to live for a period of 100 or more years, will give products worth Rs 2.2 billion. On February 3, the Chief Justice asked advocate Prashant Bhushan, who was representing APDR, to draw a protocol where governments explore possibility of using either railway or waterways, instead of cutting trees. The top court will further hear the matter after two weeks.
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