A public interest litigation petition has been filed in the Madras High Court to restrain felling of around 75 fully grown trees with a wide canopy from a sprawling shrubbery spread over four acres of vacant land inside the Regional Institute of Ophthalmology and Government Ophthalmic Hospital at Egmore here.
When the case was listed for admission before Justices M. Sathyanarayanan and N. Seshasayee on Wednesday, the judges found that the Registry had listed it before them wrongly though all public interest litigation petitions related to environmental issues should go before a Bench led by Justice Vineet Kothari.
They directed the Registrar (Judicial) M. Jothiraman to get the case listed before the appropriate bench after obtaining necessary approval from Chief Justice Amreshwar Pratap Sahi. Captain P.B. Narayanan, 63, a resident of Pantheon Road in Egmore for the last 14 years had filed the case to protect the trees. In an affidavit filed through his counsel A. Yogeshwaran, the litigant stated that the 75 trees on the hospital campus serve as a habitat for black kites and parakeets. Similarly, the shrubbery around them served as a habitat for mongoose and other animals. The area had been left vacant for long and helps in recharging groundwater.
Now since the hospital had decided to construct a building, steps were afoot to fell the trees down, he said and suggested that new buildings could be raised after demolishing the dilapidated buildings of the hospital. Such old buildings in disuse were available next to the nurses residential quarters inside the hospital complex, he pointed out.
Highlighting the importance of trees, the petitioner said, a researcher from the University of Calcutta had quantified the services rendered by a tree during its average life span of 50 years to be ₹3.55 crore given the price of oxygen and other benefits provided by the trees. The Centre’s Films Division too had made a documentary on the basis of such quantification, he added. The petitioner went on to state that the quantification does not take into account the destruction of habitat for birds, insects and other mammals. Unchecked urbanisation had led to a recent report revealing that there was only one tree for every 33 people residing in Chennai city and it was a cause for concern, he concluded.
