Banyan trees declared protected heritage in Karachi

City authorities have declared all banyan trees as protected heritage in order to prevent them from being chopped and the provincial environment department has started preserving 68 old Banyan trees to save them.

“On the directives of Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah, I wrote a letter to the Karachi commissioner for declaring all the banyan trees in the city as protected heritage. These trees are protected and preserved in other South Asian countries but unfortunately they are being cut in Karachi for the last several decades,” Sindh Law and Environment Adviser Barrister Murtaza Wahab told The News on Friday.

He visited the Clifton area on Friday to inspect banyan trees in the vicinity, and said that they had identified at least 68 such trees in the area which were decades old and some of them could be 100 years old too. The trees were facing the threat of becoming extinct due to the negligence. “Initially, we have planned to preserve 68 banyan trees in the Clifton area and later, we will be preserving and protecting the remaining old trees in other parts of Karachi,” the adviser said. He deplored that Karachi was becoming a jungle of concrete structures.

The city administration and the provincial government have imposed a complete ban on the cutting of trees in Karachi but unfortunately, dozens of trees are being cut down by citizens, builders and various municipal bodies on a daily basis to acquire more land and construct buildings and other structures in the city. Wahab said an aerial view of Karachi showed that only graveyards in the city had a large number of trees and most of the graveyards were full grown-up trees, including neem and banyan trees.

“The NED University of Engineering and Technology has planted several thousand plants on its campus and the University of Karachi is also full of fully grown-up trees.” He said trees without a cluster were hard to find in the city.

Urging Karachiites to plant trees , he said he was planning to beautify the flyovers and underpasses with plants and trees on the pattern of some other cities of Pakistan, but municipal authorities were not willing to cooperate in playing their role to make the city green. “We are now trying to preserve old banyan trees in the city. Later, we will protect other trees in the city, and carry out plantation drives in the city,” Wahab added.