Branches of three debdaru trees in Jadavpur were illegally chopped off on Sunday morning, a councillor of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) said.
The three trees stood on a pavement along Jadavpur Central Road, near the 8B bus stand. Now, only the bare trunks remain.
“Some residents saw the trees were being hacked around 7am and alerted me. By then all the branches had been chopped off,” said Mousumi Das, councillor of Ward 93. “The KMC has issued no permission to cut the trees.”
She alleged that a shop-owner had got the trees hacked.
A source close to the councillor said she lodged a complaint late on Sunday after returning to the city. She was out of the town till the evening.
In February, mayor Firhad Hakim had asked KMC officials to lodge an FIR whenever they came across hacking of trees.
He made the statement after a caller in the weekly phone-in programme, “Talk to Mayor”, told him that a tree had been hacked in Kasba to make space for cars.
Sources in the civic body said a tree can be chopped off with the consent of the state forest department and the KMC.
A Kolkatan who wants to cut a tree must first obtain a no-objection certificate (NOC) from the KMC. Then a letter, with the NOC attached to it, has to be sent to the divisional forest officer (utilisation) seeking permission to cut the tree.
“The branches of the debdaru trees in Jadavpur have been completely chopped off. That is illegal,” said a KMC official. “The only hope is that leaves and branches will grow again since the trunks have not been cut,” the official said after this newspaper sent him pictures of the trees.