Midweek Musings 3 24.12.2025

 Bangalore is quintessentially green. If we lose the green cover its scorching the Mother Earth

By Malini Shankar

Digital Discourse Foundation

The prospective “tunnel road project” for Bangalore – meant to serve the ‘high speed needs’ of the Electronics City employees exclusively, so that they get a smooth ride from pristine Bangalore to Electronics City which they assume to have a right to pollute and render a gas chamber is earmarked to cleave Lalbagh Bengaluru’s green lung and green pride - is the new source of conflict and tension for the native denizens of the Garden City who grew up on misty mornings and foggy cloudy summers.  These busy bodies who work addicted to Whatsapp pretend success in every breathe and reminds one of that psychotherapist who was so busy counselling a quarrelling couple from 5.00a.m. that she did not have time to attend to her own ailing mother.

One native of cold n misty Sakleshpur in Hassan district tells me that the December chills in Bangalore this year was colder than his native Sakleshpur. Such is the fame of Bangalore’s weather indeed.

But if this blessed tunnel road project does become even a remote reality, the likely green price to pay is the massacre of thousands of trees, choking ground water and sealing the hydrology of elevated Bangalore; destroying Lalbagh is like scorching Bangalore for thousands of years; and killing tens of thousands of birds. Each tree gives enough oxygen for atleast five adults per day and offers habitat to anything from 100 – 150 birds, per tree apart from reptiles, butterflies, insects and mammals like arboreal – tree nesting rodents and monkeys. Birders have documented nothing less than Great Pied Hornbill and Hoope Bird in the botanical sanctum sanctorum of Lalbagh.

The immaculately curated Japanese Garden has inspired not just horticulturists, architects, poets, filmmakers and writers but has spawned generations of garden birds, reptiles, insects, and smaller mammals like squirrels contributing to the very rich milieu of urban wildlife and garden city / urban forests of India.

We don’t have peacocks strutting the city’s pavements and boulevards like in Lutyens’ Delhi but our parakeets feed a poet’s imagination for decades.

Most critical in terms of significance is the Carbon Sink that Lalbagh is: Thousands of trees, creepers, shrubs, grasses, water bodies, contribute to the green cover and account for generation of fresh oxygen, for sequestering the tonnes of Carbon emissions in the city, cooling the city with wisps of cloud and mist. No wonder Decembers are cooler than Sakleshpur in the Western Ghats.

If the busybodies make up their mind to either car pool or take public transport they will not only help decrease vehicular pollution but will save Lalbagh’s green cover for generations to come.