Development comes at a cost, but how do you explain felling 'hundreds of trees' for expansion of 5 km road?

Every development has a cost associated with it. Be it human resource development or infrastructural development, something needs to be sacrificed to gain something else, exactly like in the case of road expansion projects. Sadly, trees need to be felled to expand roads in order to facilitate an ever-growing traffic situation in urban as well as semi-urban areas. But is it really necessary? Isn’t there any other way out? 

The case in hand is the recent felling of trees for the expansion of a 5 km road stretch from Sanakhemundi to Digapahandi in Odisha's Ganjam district. It is alleged that 1300 trees were erased for this development purpose.

The issue was highlighted by a Twitter user, Dilip Sabat, who could not resist but tweet a video watching the felling of a huge banyan tree beside the same stretch of road for its expansion. He penned down an emotional note on his social media page, Facebook, narrating the incident.

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Thousands of trees cut down for road expansion in Ganjam district, Odisha? A forest department official said that more than 1300 trees are being felled on both sides of the road from Sanakhemundi to Digapahandi (5km) alone. pic.twitter.com/mQ6IicCRyI

— Dilip Sabat (@dilip_sabat) April 10, 2023

“When the sharp edges of the chainsaw were cutting the tree, nobody offered a word of sympathy for the great banyan which has been standing at the same spot for generations. From the contractor to the tree cutter, everybody was getting restless and waiting eagerly for the tree to fall so that they can leave the place with their remuneration. The tree which provided cool shed for passersby to sit for a moment and reflect on their journey, has turned a green graveyard now,” Sabat wrote.

Emotional notes apart, it is pertinent to mention here that modernization and globalization paved the way to infrastructural development in cities. This causes an increase in the urban population due to the creation of job opportunities forcing people to migrate from rural to urban areas.

Being said that, one of the major reasons for climate change is the destruction of trees because of infrastructural developments like roads and bridges. Development or conversion of single-lane road into four and six-lane roads, and more are increasing due to the increased population. Trees are cut down to promote these activities which are inevitable. The trees are sources of oxygen and they help carbon capture and sequestration.

We drive on the highway to see how fast our cars can go, whine about the expensive tolls, and boast about how quickly we got there. But we don't think for a second about how the roadway may have been constructed. In India, cutting down trees is a necessary part of road construction and subsequent expansion. 

Hundreds of previously nearby trees were planted because our predecessors felt it would be pleasant to have trees that provide shade alongside the roads. And these silent trees were an easy target when the time came to expand the roads. 

Cutting down trees has a negative impact on the ecosystem in many ways, especially as natural disasters are linked to climate change. The situation becomes even direr in Odisha which loses a lot of green cover to natural disasters like cyclones every year.

To put the magnitude of tree cutting into perspective, a whopping 18.5 million trees were felled for the widening of roads in Odisha in the past decade. The then Odisha Forest and Environment Minister Bikram Keshari Arukha furnished this startling data in March 2021 in the State Assembly.

According to a circular issued by the Union Ministry of Environment & Forests (MoEF), if a road project has a length of less than 100km, there is no need to get Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) from any government agency. The Supreme Court in 2022 observed that such an argument in the present case scenario seems like an attempt to circumvent the law of the land.

So, taking all the arguments into consideration, it would be safe to conclude while tree felling is obviously hazardous for both humanity and the environment, infrastructure development is vital for economic development too. And unless the researchers and government come out with a feasible alternative to tree felling, the cutting of trees will sadly go on for construction and expansion of roads on the earth.