The word ‘green' recurs a lot in any conversation about Jalahalli. And the reason for it is discernibly visible as you walk through the neighbourhood. On a particularly hot early summer afternoon, walking through Jalahalli's main road could have been a bad idea if not for the enviable canopy of trees that guard against the heat.
The map of the neighbourhood shows the rare wealth of green cover that Jalahalli has managed to retain in its parks and patches of trees that accompany you as you move about in the area.
“The sheer number of ‘jaali' trees in the area gave Jalahalli its name. This was a forest area in the past with barely 20 houses in the locality,” says Munivenkatappa who works as a daily wage worker. Sitting just a stone's throw away from a nearly 100-year-old tree in the centre of Jalahalli village, he and Anand who owns a tent shop, paint a picture of the village they grew up in.
A lake and a kote
“There was a lake and a kote (fort) where people were not allowed to enter after 6 p.m. because that's where the tigers and other wild animals would lurk about. I remember that it was all a forest with just the Air Force base nearby. Soon people settled in the village and it was the village that gave Hindustan Machine Tools a portion of land to set up a unit,” they say.
Time travel through Jalahalli's past would indicate the setting up of the mother unit of the HMT Machine Tools in the area as a landmark event. “HMT is almost synonymous with Jalahalli. The factory produced both watches and industrial goods and was an important source of employment. When we travelled to the unit by factory buses, there was nothing around our office. Even to this day, HMT has maintained the green cover within the huge factory premises. Bharat Electronics Ltd. (BEL) too has huge lawns and plantations around factories,” says M.S. Madhusudhana Rao, director, HMT Employees' Cooperative House Building Society Ltd.
Well-connected
For Madhusudhana and K.C. Govindaiah, director-internal auditor of the same co-operative society, Jalahalli, their workplace, has gradually transitioned from an isolated forest area to a burgeoning residential hub. “The area is well-connected through the Ring Road as well as the highway. The metro and the airport have also become the key drivers of growth in the area. Naturally, the locality has become one of the many seats of prime property in the city,” says Govindaiah.
So amidst patches of green are towering apartment complexes that have come up not in addition to the green cover but most often in opposition to and in place of parks and trees.
Another aspect of Jalahalli that competes to define the identity of the locale and wins, is the Air Force Station Jalahalli. Jaya Parameshwaran, a resident of the area, recounts the time when she grew up in the Air Force quarters when her father was recruited into the Force. “I have seen avenue trees in the Air Force campus, especially near the Air Force quarters. The Air Force Station forms the main identity of the area. No other area has a road named after the First Chief of Air Staff of the Indian Air Force, Air Marshal Subroto Mukherjee,” says Jaya. She remembers how Jalahalli was significantly neglected without any volvo buses from or to the area. Acknowledging that the area is now growing commercially, she laments the fact that sprawling gardens have to make way for apartment complexes. “The gardens are slowly disappearing. But wherever the Air Force is, the green cover is being maintained,” she adds.
Standing testimony to her statement, spread over 1,600 acres, the Air Force Station at Jalahalli is the horticulturalist's pride. Maintained with discipline and pride, what the station adds to the area and the city is best described in the words of Group Captain Sanjay Kant, Commanding Officer of the Communicating Training Institute, Air Force Station Jalahalli: “We are the lungs of the city.”
