June 23, 2006	Friday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 26, 1427

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window).

LAHORE, June 22: Hundreds of citizens belonging to all walks of life on Thursday staged a vigorous demonstration outside the Lahore Press Club to protest against cutting of trees in the city in the name of development.

Holding placards and banners inscribed with their demands, and chanting slogans pleading for saving “lungs of earth”, the protesters went round the Simla Pahari and vowed not to allow the authorities to embark upon their plan of felling 10,000 (the figure they quoted) trees for widening the Canal Bank Road from Dharampura underpass to Thokar Niaz Beg.

They feared a sharp rise in the air pollution level as well as in ambient temperature owing to cutting of thousands of trees along the canal — the only green patch left in the city.

Doctors, lawyers, writers, poets, architects, artists, urban planners, environmentalists, students and others assembled under the banner of the Lahore Bachao Tehrik and distributed pamphlets among passer-by motorists in their ‘Save Our Trees’ campaign.

Prominent among them were rights activists Shahtaj Qizilbash, environmentalists Imrana Tiwana and Ali Hassan Habib, architect and conservationist Kamil Khan Mumtaz, Khwaja Aijaz Anwar, artist-cum-activist Faryal Gauhar, Farooq Tariq, Dr Yasmin Rashid and Advocate Rafay Alam.

The taxpayers’ hard-earned Rs700 million would go down the drain as the project, they feared, would fail to improve the city traffic conditions.

“A motorway cutting through the heart of the city is not acceptable and is not the solution to this perceived problem,” they said, urging more integrated traffic management and urban development strategies.

Mrs Tiwana said urban highways were no answer to the traffic problem, which rather needed reduction in the number of vehicles plying on the city roads.

“We are not against development but it should not take place at the cost of environment,” she said, apprehending that the project would result in 90 per cent increase in the pollution level.

The powers-that-be should revive the grandeur of the city and ensure participation of the masses in decision making about their habitat, she pleaded, pledging to continue mobilising the citizens for the cause.

Ms Qizilbash pointed out that the widening of Gulberg’s Main Boulevard and Jail Road had not resulted in getting rid of traffic jams and the situation would be no different on the Canal Road too.

London had narrow lanes, she said, but the vehicular mess there was controlled through enforcement of traffic laws whereas everyone here drove his vehicle as if he had gone mad, openly violating rules set for road users.

She regretted that only fancy trees or bushes were planted in place of the thousands of decades-old shady trees felled for constructing underpasses along the Canal Bank.

Ms Gauhar said the proposed plan threatened to destroy the character of the city, besides depriving millions of ordinary citizens of a source of recreation.

“These trees are the lungs of our city where ordinary people take refuge from the scorching sun. Without them the city shall die a painful death.”

Alleging that vested interests were behind the project, she said it would ruin greenery on 60 acres along the canal.

Questioning the government’s development strategy, she asked development did not mean just constructing roads all around. “Why don’t they divert these funds to establish schools and hospitals and to provide better water and sanitation facilities which are real welfare-oriented development projects?”

Mr Anwar, Dr Yasmeen and Tamkeenat Karim also see no justification for widening of roads as, they fear, it will cause chain collisions not witnessed so far in the provincial metropolis.

They said it would also destroy ecological system and the natural habitat of thousands of birds and animals, besides radically increasing toxic pollution and lung diseases.