Urban areas are seeing large scale deforestation, removing the purifiers of polluted city air and destroying the homes of flora and fauna.
Over the last 30 years, forests nearly two-thirds the size of Haryana have been lost to encroachments (15,000 sq km) and 23,716 industrial projects (14,000 sq km), according to government data (2016). Artificial forests cannot be replacements, as the government acknowledged.
This tree was cut many times and finally, it could no longer maintain its strength and was totally uprooted a few days back in Visakhapatnam.
The horticulture department came and cut the tree and took it away leaving the huge trunk behind. Despite having a crane, and a lorry, they refused to transplant the tree in their nursery.
But we could not let the tree die.
We contacted the forest department and the district forest officer provided us with three people. We took our van and somehow managed to get a few more people and after working for an hour together, we were able to place the tree in the car. Next, we transplanted it in the forest area of Kambalakonda.
The work was extremely difficult to manually lift such a huge tree and then drive with it for such a long distance. But we did it with the strength of nature again proving that if we will, we can save nature along with development.
A nature lover and an environmental activist, Oindrila is a class 11 student from Visakhapatnam. You can frequently see her striking on fridays and fighting for several other issues. She is one of the most active volunteers at FFF AP and a few other organisations. She loves to paint, listen to music, feed stray animals, and care for trees.