A good monsoon shower over the weekend gave an opportunity to the tree-friendly ‘Vata Foundation’ to once again showcase their prowess in saving and protecting trees. It so happened that a top pharma company in Genome Valley at Shamirpet wanted to expand its infrastructure within their facility, but in the way were about 120 trees.
On doing some enquiry, it was informed that the predominantly ‘China Badam’ trees of which about 50 were fully grown and aged about 10-15 years cannot survive if they were uprooted and moved to another place. Yet, somehow the management was not convinced and through a common friend, contacted P. Uday Krishna, Foundation trustee.
“We were only too happy to help as we have the experience of translocating similar kind of trees when the Botanical Gardens road was widened. We could successfully move up to 70 trees 25 kilometres away to Kollur despite the municipal corporation giving it up, and after taking approval of the High Court,” he explains.
Braving the weather
Gathering his trusted helps — Madan Prasad, Shafi; volunteer friends Prakash, Sachin, Madhu and Divya — he motored towards Shamirpet amid continuous rain on Saturday before dawn broke. All that the Foundation requested the firm was to arrange for four excavators and three cranes for moving the trees.
First, 15 big trees were moved and work continued on Sunday with 30 more uprooted and relocated to an open area a small distance away within the facility. “We had a few issues due to the slush as the rainfall was incessant but managed to pull it off and the management was grateful we could save their trees. We also trained the workers on how the job can be done for other trees,” says Mr. Uday Krishna.
Vata Foundation takes pride in the fact that it has successfully translocated upto a dozen tree species which the official departments claimed “not translocatable”. “We would be happy if the department concerned considers every tree as translocatable as one fully grown tree is equal to 1,000 saplings. So given a chance, it may survive. The only way to find out is by translocating,” he adds.