“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

This quote by the well-known cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead has never been truer than in the recent victory of a citizens group who fought, and won, the battle to protect a stretch of magnificent banyan trees along a national highway in India.

A 46-km stretch of road between Hyderabad and Manneguda had been marked by the government of Telangana for widening into a four-lane highway. Once a part of the state highway (SH-4) this road was transferred to the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) in 2017 and renamed as National Highway 163 (NH-163).

Like several other road widening projects in the country this too would have resulted in the loss of thousands of trees. The number of trees aside, what alarmed many was that the 900 banyan trees were huge in size and possibly more than 100 years old, lining the road in Chevella, as Article 14 reported in November 2024.

The Chevella banyans, as they are popularly known, held fond memories for several people who were horrified that the banyans would be lost forever. Galvanised to do something, a group calling themselves Nature Lovers of Hyderabad started the campaign “Save the Banyans of Chevella” with an online petition in 2019.

Campaigns like this come at a time of unprecedented global warming. The years 2015 to 2023 were the nine warmest years on record, with global temperatures reaching at least 1 deg C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial baseline, according to the World Meteorological Organization, which said in a statement that 2023 had “shattered climate records, accompanied by extreme weather which has left a trail of devastation and despair”.

India has repeatedly been shown as one of the countries most vulnerable to global climate-change risks (here, here and here).



Read more - https://article-14.com/post/citizen-movements-try-to-stem-the-decimation-of-urban-india-s-trees-in-era-of-record-heat-toxic-dust-659e0cea63c11