The canopies of trees in all three sectors of Salt Lake will be trimmed from next week in preparation for Durga Puja.
The tree tops along all main roads and arteries will be pruned to ensure that the township’s roads and streets get “maximum illumination from street lights”, an official of the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation (BMC) said.
According to estimates of the civic body’s environment department, Salt Lake has more than 10,000 trees.
While many are inside parks, a sizeable number are on median dividers of roads that cut across the township’s blocks. These trees will be the focus of the trimming teams, a senior official of the BMC’s environment department said.
“We have received requests from councillors and several block committees that organise Durga Puja to undertake the pruning drive ahead of Puja,” the official said.
The reason cited by them is that despite the installation of LED lights on the street light poles, many roads have inadequate illumination because the canopies cast shadows on the streets below.
Salt Lake has a large number of Krishna Chura, Radha Chura and Kadam trees, which have large canopies. These trees had been planted in the block parks, on dividers and pavements as part of an avenue plantation drive.
Multiple teams equipped with chainsaws, truck-mounted hydraulic ladders and earth mover machines will be despatched from next week to prune the trees, an official said.
Across Kolkata, there have been many instances of trees being hacked in the name of pruning, leading to their untimely deaths. Those that survive such unscientific pruning become too unstable to withstand storms and have toppled as the weight of the canopies had shifted to one side.
A senior official of the civic body said that engineers from the corporation will accompany the pruning teams to ensure that the trees are not hacked or the branches are not cut off from one side only.
SUPER SOUVENIR
Picture by Bhubaneswarananda Halder
Individual category winners of The Telegraph Salt Lake Super Souvenir 2021 and Click Your Township 2021 at Novotel on Saturday evening. The prize distribution ceremony was of the annual contest among the puja souvenirs brought out by blocks and housing complexes in Salt Lake, New Town and the immediate neighbourhood — the area where the community supplement The Telegraph Salt Lake is distributed with The Telegraph every Friday.