Hyderabad, July 29: World Conservation Day was celebrated on Tuesday at the National Geophysical Research Institute with a plea to plant more trees, a fitting sentiment for a campus that has 16,000 trees.
The half-day event kicked off with a tree planting session which saw the chief guest, C S Ramalakshmi, Additional Principal Chief Conservator of Forest (Environment), and guest of honour, P Raghuveer, Chief Conservator of Forests (Environment Cell), guide students from the NGRI school on how to plant and care for saplings.
The event itself featured speeches by the IFS officers as well as by environmental experts on two other aspects of Hyderabad’s ecosystem: water bodies and avian life.
Raghuveer reached out to the younger generation in the audience, the NGRI school kids, by asking them to perform a simple task: reduce their individual electricity bills by at least 10 per cent in two months. He then extended the challenge to NGRI itself, to which the Director V P Dimri promised to appoint a committee to do.
Raghuveer also talked about the importance of conserving electricity by switching off fans and lights and computers and also about planting more trees to replenish oxygen. His advice to the students: ‘Think big, think differently, but act locally’.
An independent conservationist called Rajiv Mathews then gave a presentation about sparrows, or more precisely about how they have vanished from urban habitats. “We started noticing in the late 80s and early 90s that sparrows, which were once numerous in urban areas had starting vanishing,” he said. The reason for this is the disappearance of the old style houses and their replacement with apartment blocks. The old houses afforded sparrows a space to build their nests and feed their young.
Though they can be seen in rural areas they have completely disappeared from urban settings.
The final presentation was by NGRI scientist V V S Gurunadha Rao on urban lakes in Greater Hyderabad.
“Hyderabad has 167 lakes with an area of 10 hectare or more, but all of them are shrinking rapidly,” he said.
NGRI and the then HUDA worked on a restoration project of the lakes. Safilguda Cheruvu, Durgam Cheruvu, Hussain Sagar, Mir Alam Tank, Uppal Cheruvu and others were selected. The NGRI team studied these lakes and came up with practical suggestions for restoring them.
–Agencies–