Fifteen children, including a seven-year-old girl, trainers at the local Saagasam Sports Academy, skated their way to the memorial of former president APJ Abdul Kalam, urging people en-route to remove the harmful ‘seemai karuvelam’ trees.
As the district administration was organising a series of awareness programmes to educate the people on the need to remove the invasive trees, which caused harms to cattle, humans and environment, the children stepped in with skating shoes to play their part on Sunday.
Ever since, the Madurai bench of Madras High court directed the collectors of southern districts to remove the trees in their districts, couple of months ago, the district administration had launched an exercise on war footing.
As the dreadful trees have infested in more than one lakh hectares in the district, including about 68,000 hectares in private lands, Collector S Natarajan decided to involve the public and voluntary organisations in the gigantic task.
As he sensitised the people on the ill-effects of the trees, which were capable of even absorbing the moisture in the air and leave the atmosphere hot and dry, the children joined to lend a helping hand.
Holding placards, calling for the removal of the karuvelam trees, 35 boys and girls in the 7 to 13 age group skated from Aranmanai to the entrance of Collectorate complex, covering a distance of about five km.
Later, 15 children, who had been skating for more than four years, continued up to the memorial of Kalam at Pei Karumbu, covering distance of about 60 km. After Mr. Natarajan and Deputy Inspector General of Police Kapil Saratkar flagged off the rally at 9 a.m., the children skated their way to the memorial.
The children stopped en route to distribute pamphlets to the public and take refreshments before they reached the memorial around 3.30 p.m., M. Mageswaran, secretary of the sports academy, said.
The response to the children was overwhelming throughout, he said.
