Taking up a petition filed by former Punjab chief minister and Amritsar MP, Captain Amarinder Singh, against indiscriminate cutting of trees in Amritsar, the Punjab and Haryana high court on Wednesday asked the state government to decide the issue within three weeks.
In a PIL, Amarinder told the court that more than 1,000 trees were proposed to be cut for projects in Amritsar, including widening of roads, and the trees included "rare species" which were fully grown and were over hundred years old. He said he is not against the proposed projects, but was seeking intervention of the court to direct the authorities to conduct a survey for minimizing the cutting of trees.
The former CM also contended that the project suffers from lack of appropriate mitigation measures in engineering designs, construction schedule and techniques. The authorities ought to have considered deviation of proposed road lines so as to avoid massive destruction of trees, rather than insisting on having a straight road line. The trees were to be felled on Mall Road, Circular Road, Kitchlu Road, and Chowk Bhandari Bridge road and 279 trees were to be chopped for upgradation of GT Road from Bhandari Bridge to Guru Nanak Dev University.
Submitting that Amritsar would become a concrete jungle with the proposed move, Amarinder asserted that several representations have been filed before the Punjab government but no action was taken. A division bench headed by acting chief justice Ashutosh Mohunta asked the Punjab government to take a decision within three weeks.
src:punjabnewsonline.com