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Journalism of Courage
The Pune Circle of the state Forest Department will fall short by over 1.5 lakh trees in its goal to plant over 70 lakh trees, as part of a state government drive to plant 33 crore trees across Maharashtra by September 30. The Pune Circle will fall short of the target by 1.58 lakh trees as it doesn’t have any land bank left to plant them.
The Pune Circle, comprising the districts of Pune and Solapur, was given the target of planting 71.86 lakh trees, but will be able to plant only 70.28 lakh of them.
To reach the goal, various tree plantation targets have been given to almost every government agency. This year, in Pune Circle, a total of 2.37 crore saplings are supposed to be planted by forest and non-forest agencies. In Pune District, the Forest Department was asked to plant 52.35 lakh trees while other agencies had to plant 1.03 crore trees. In Solapur district, the Forest Department was given a target of 19.2 lakh saplings while other agencies were asked to plant 66.32 lakh saplings.
“One hectare of land approximately holds about 1,100 trees. In the last three years, we have planted about one crore trees on forest land using the land that was available to us. This year, we had about 1,430 hectares of land, on which we are planting about 70 lakh trees. This has totally exhausted our land bank and we will require more land if we have to carry out more plantation drives from next year,” said Vivek Khandekar, chief conservator of forests, Pune Circle.
A Sreelakshmi, deputy conservator of forests, Pune Circle, said the department has worked hard to reclaim land from encroachers and managed to secure about 100 hectres more, which will also be used to plant trees under the drive. “We are facing a crunch of land available for afforestation. It is imperative to use as much of the land that we legally own as possible by clearing it of encroachments, which is an arduous process. This year, we managed to free about 100 hectres from encroachments and are using it to plant saplings,” said Sreelakshmi.
