Fearing that Bengaluru flyover project has undercounted trees to be cut, residents move court

Bengaluru, a city rapidly losing its green cover to infrastructure projects, had an important job to do: count its trees. In August 2019, the Karnataka High Court mandated the exercise under the Karnataka Preservation of Trees Act, 1976, setting a three-year deadline which wasn’t completed even seven years later.

Residents in some neighbourhoods decided to then take the task into their own hands, driven by the apprehension of losing trees to several large-scale infrastructure projects announced for the city, including flyovers and tunnel roads. What they found has prompted them to push back against some of these impending projects.

In east Bengaluru’s Indiranagar, a group of residents mapped the trees along the alignment of a proposed 13-km flyover from Swami Vivekananda Metro Station in the east to Silk Board Junction in the south, via Indiranagar.

The flyover’s detailed project report estimates that 89 trees will be felled for the proposed elevated corridor, while 235 trees fall within its construction width. The latter figure indicates the number of trees within the designated construction area, not necessarily the number that will be cut.

Unconvinced that these figures reflected the trees on the ground, I Change Indiranagar, a network of resident welfare associations in the area, decided to conduct an independent survey, starting with a roughly 3.5-km stretch of...

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