Green Guardians: Saving the city’s trees

Y. Maheswara Reddy | NT

Bengaluru: For seven years now, members of SwaNeeHa, a citizen activist group in Raja Rajeshwari Nagar, have spent their weekends and free time monitoring the neighbourhood’s trees. They are on the lookout for nails, steel rods and rusty tree guards. To these good Samaritans, spending one hour a day in a park has become part of their daily routine.

The volunteers have even developed a special device to remove the steel rods hammered into trees by bar benders. “We have developed a puller out of the waste materials we bought at the Sunday Bazaar,” said a volunteer. “It has become easy for us to remove 6 mm to 20 mm steel rods from trees.”

Vijay Nishant, popularly known as a tree doctor, has appreciated SwaNeeHa’s efforts. “It is a good initiative and worth emulating in other areas as well,” he remarked. “BBMP authorities must penalize those responsible for hammering the steel rods into trees.”

Bengaluru Hudugaru is another volunteer-led team working hard to remove nails, staples and posters from trees since November 2020. Till now, they have done 40 campaigns across 30 wards in Bengaluru to create awareness among the public on the importance of saving trees from nails, staples and posters. N. Manjunath Prasad, former BBMP Chief Commissioner, ADGP of Police Bhaskar Rao and other prominent personalities participated in a rally from M.G. Road to Dr Rajkumar Glass House at the BBMP Head Office, along with Bengaluru Hudugaru on March 21. This group has removed 13500 nails from 1,200 trees, some five kilos of staples and have lodged twelve complaints against those responsible for harming the city’s trees.”

Bengaluru Hudugaru, a team of volunteers are also working hard to remove nails, staples and poster’s from trees from November 2020. Till now, they have done 40 campaigns across 30 wards of Bengaluru to create awareness among the public on the importance of saving trees from nails, staples and posters. The then BBMP Commissioner N. Manjunath Prasad, Additional Director General of Police Bhaskar Rao and prominent personalities participated in a rally from MG Road to Dr Rajkumar Glass House at the BBMP Head Office along with Bengaluru Hudugaru on March 21. Prasad had said at the time that all people must come together to make trees free from nails.

Bengaluru Hudugaru volunteers have removed around 13500 nails from 1200 trees and staples of 5 kgs and lodged 12 criminal complaints against those responsible for driving nails, staplers and putting up banners on trees.

However, removing the rods inserted into trees by bar benders for construction work was a challenge. They then stumbled upon SwaNeeHa and found that they had designed an instrument to tackle this.

“Our team is really happy with the instrument designed by SwaNeeHa to remove the rod’s inserted into trees by construction people. Because this was one thing our team was helpless to get rid of the pain the tree was undergoing,’’ said Vinod Kartavya of Bengaluru Hudugaru.

SwaNeeHa began back in 2015, with five members, led by founder S. Harish. “We wanted to keep the parks in and around R.R. Nagar free from garbage and plastic. Later, residents showed an interest in joining hands with us to keep parks clean.”

Seeing garbage and plastic waste on the HalageVaderahalli Lake bund made Harish wonder if he could spare some time to clean the bund area every day. He followed through on the idea and when the bund began to show an improvement over time, he and his friends turned their attention to Bheemanakatte Lake, which also languished in neglect.

That’s when they saw the condition of the parks in R.R. Nagar. “We would collect two bags full of plastic bottles every day from the parks in the locality,” Harish said. However, disposing of these bottles was another challenge. “We requested the BBMP health officers to help us dispose of plastic bottles. They made arrangements to remove plastic from parks,” he said.

Dr Kalpana Viswanath, a gynecologist, is also one of the volunteers of SwaNeeHa. “I happened to meet the volunteers at Vivekananda Park in R.R. Nagar. They welcomed me when I said I wanted to join them in their efforts to keep the park clean. I am very happy to be part of this group and I religiously join them every day to keep parks clean,” said Dr Hassan.

Now, the volunteers have extended their activities to remove old, rusted or abandoned tree guards around the trees. “Till date we have removed around 300 tree guards and handed them over to the authorities concerned. The rusted and old tree guards were ruining the growth of the trees,’’ said Harish, adding that many residents are informing the volunteers about the nails on trees at thei