How green was Bangalore city

The air of the place is fine, but the city has not water! Nothing seems to grow on this land!”: Lenin Bowring, Independent Commissioner to Mysore (Bengaluru Darshana, Udaya Bhanu Kala Sangha publication).

That’s right! Bowring was talking about good old Bangalore in the 1850s. After the British killed Tipu Sultan at Srirangapatna in 1799, they commissioned Dr Francis Buchanan to undertake a survey of Tipu’s kingdom: “(This is) a naked country!” he returned (Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain, Anuradha Mathur and Dilip Da Cunha, Rupa).

Buchanan, who does take note of the ‘extensive gardens’ left behind by Haidar and Tipu (Lal Bagh), describes the land he sees as he travels from Bangalore to Srirangapatna: “The uncultivated land is more hilly than any between the Ghats and Bangalore. It is very rocky and bare, and does not contain even copse wood.” Buchanan is in fact baffled by the enterprise of Hyder and Tipu in creating Lalbagh: “...for in the arid country, every thing, during the dry season, must be artificially watered.” About the eastern part of Bangalore, he says: “...much of the country through which I passed today is a waste … the country is remarkably bare.”

However, about 60 years after Buchanan’s survey, during his own tenure, Bowring was witness to the grand transformation of the city, from dryland to ‘a tank civilisation’, as Mathur and Da Cunha describe it. In a moving tribute to the genius that handled the water problem of the time, Lady Bowring had said: “The (paddy) fields are so luxuriant, they look like lakes themselves. These lakes have been built with so much skill and knowledge! (Bengaluru Darshan.)”

Mathur and Da Cunha quote another British official, George Viscount Valencia, who noted the transformation: “This Bengalooru that has grown in fame has changed in front of my eyes. This region was more desert than I had ever seen earlier in my life.” So, the point that everyone who cares about this city now knows is that this city wasn’t always green.

This preamble, in the background of the shambles the city now is with cloudbursts and falling trees, is to ask the unpleasant question: “What do we do with our old, diseased and crippled trees?” An exasperated bureaucrat recently snapped in a private conversation: “Do you know why these trees were planted? For firewood!” In fact, outside of Cubbon Park and Lal Bagh, the roadside greening of Bangalore is of more recent vintage, perhaps 60 years or so.

Now, with a crippling water shortage that sends our politicians to delirium, and the annual mess of uprooted trees and falling branches and hour-long traffic jams, the roadside tree is increasingly the vengeful spirit, striking back at the self-absorbed citizens of a desperate new metro in India. Summer rains in Bangalore, once inspiration for love lyrics, fill citizens with dread and demoralise civic authorities.

Trees fall on two-wheelers, cars and buses, on crumbling old homes; they block roads and snap power lines. As the monsoon approaches, every incumbent Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) commissioner turns philosophical and looks for greener pastures, if you’ll forgive the ironic metaphor. People sweat during power cuts, traffic crawls and Bangalore broods. We don’t like trees anymore.

BBMP has planted signs below the trees on Chord Road: “Warning! There is a chance of trees and branches falling during the rain. So drive cautiously.” As roads widen and trees find their ground dangerously narrowed and cemented, with ground water levels crashing beneath every reckoning, the trees are beginning to die from the inside, seemingly skulking like zombies, to fall upon us.

One estimate after a survey undertaken two years ago says there are a million trees in the BBMP area. The civic authorities have made plans to identify “potentially dangerous” ones among them and axe them. The social forestry officials have been told not to plant these dangerous species, which don’t have deep roots, along the roadside. But given the high corruption and the low credibility the authorities enjoy, they can’t get the environmentalists to engage in a meaningful debate.

But it’s time we took this problem heads on. We should acknowledge that tree cover brings down temperatures by a couple of degrees, significantly reduces pollution and, not to forget, noise levels. But as the new mayor waxes lush on his ‘Green Agenda’, let’s also hear the other side, those mandated to deliver the ‘Development Agenda’ for Bangalore. They would ask: Do our roadsides make good ground for planting trees?

I, for one, don’t think so. Not any more. There is hardly any space for walking along the narrow pavements, what is the point of planting more trees? This city has changed and we should respond to it. It has been years since Tipu and Bowring and, perhaps it’s time we created a new garden or two.

What Bowring and his lady saw in the mid-18th century Bangalore was real vision and engineering skill. We must turn to our bright minds and ask for a solution for the next 150 years — for water, power and transport. Else, simply flapping about will make for more disturbing winds.