Rising population, shrinking green spaces

NT Correspondent
Bengaluru

Once known by the moniker ‘Garden City’, Bengaluru has now been reduced to a concrete jungle, due to rising population and rapid urbanisation. The problem is more rampant on the city’s outskirts where concrete high rises are sprouting up on erstwhile green spaces to accommodate new offices and residents. This massive depletion of the city’s green cover has also led to a host of problems including soil erosion, flooding, poor groundwater percolation during rains and formation of urban surface heat islands.

As per the Journal of Environmental Management report by scientists from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), the green cover in Bengaluru has fallen from 68.2 per cent in 1973 to 6.46 per cent in 2017. That is a decrease of about 62 percentage points over 44 years. The city’s population in 1973 was around 19 lakhs, but now it is estimated to be around 1.3 crores.

Environmentalists say that the pressure of the city’s rising population was one of the main reasons behind deforestation and reduced green cover. “From the last two decades, Bengaluru has seen an increase in the number of people migrating for jobs. More people mean more houses, more space and more developmental projects. Thousands of trees have been cut down for these projects. All these huge apartment complexes that we see in the city today are built on lakes and forests,” says Dr A.N. Yellappa Reddy, an environmentalist.

Experts also say that in a city like Bengaluru, there needs to be 35 trees per person to mitigate respiratory carbon-die-oxide alone. However, a study, Trees of Bangalore by IISc, which has a ward-wise analysis of Bengaluru, shows that in 194 wards, people have less than one tree per person, only few places with one to two trees per person.

“Bengaluru is supposed to have a minimum green cover of 35 per cent for us to live a healthy lifestyle and to achieve that, we have to keep a check on the population. People and the government must acknowledge their responsibility towards the environment. If we continue to cut more trees to accommodate the increasing population, the city’s condition will worsen for the next generation,” Reddy said