Small Town Girl

I spent last Friday with my lil cousin bro making placards that were to be taken in a rally from school to spread awareness about protecting trees. World environment day just went by and the irony of all times, I chanced upon some public service ads in the newspapers about a year back which mentioned that the public can get saplings of trees, free of cost from the forest department nurseries (this is to encourage plantation of trees). What they did not mention was the location, phone numbers of those nurseries or even how to go about the whole thing. The most intuitive way to find out was to Google it. After some searches I did land up on the phone numbers and locations of the nurseries (with most of them being wrong numbers) but it wasn’t very useful.

I also learnt from the forest department webpage that I had landed on, that felling any tree, anywhere, is illegal and one needs to obtain permission for it, according to “Tree Preservation Act” I certainly think that hardly anyone is aware of this rule since tree felling is as common as pest control! Even for lopping off some branches, one needs to fill up some forms and seek permission. Come winters and everyone is lopping off branches of the bare minimum trees in India (of course without permission)! Only in the case of emergencies when a tree is hindering life, traffic or property, can the tree be felled first and then reported.

What’s more, there’s even a tree help-line. One can even complain against the illegal felling of a tree. Now that’s some more gyaan.

Talking of tree help-lines and world environment day, is anyone aware of any bird help-lines? There’s a family of house sparrows living in the verandah at my granny’s house. Every day one or two chicks drop down from the nest and die (probably because of the heavy rains). Some of them break their legs and face a slow, painful death. Apart from trying to give them some grains, water, milk and a makeshift cardboard house, I couldn’t do much. If anyone is aware of some such thing like bird shelters (on the lines of dog/cow shelters), please let me know. Let’s contribute back to our environment before we are left getting nostalgic about how things were “back in old days”!