Two activists plan to spend 27 hours atop the tree and will come down only at 5 pm today, hours after the high court is scheduled to hear the case against road widening.
After hugging the trees lining up Sankey Road in a bid to save them, tree lovers on Sunday scaled up their battle by climbing atop a tree that had escaped the Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) axe.
The civic body had marked 19 trees and cut 17 of them on the sly, before activists managed to get judicial intervention to stay the felling of the trees.
On the eve of the third hearing of the petition against the felling of trees for widening Sankey Road in the Karnataka high court, two tree lovers clambered up the tree at 2 pm. The two activists plan to spend 27 hours atop the tree and come down only at 5 pm on Monday.
The two activists, Brikesh Singh and Shivalinga M, reiterated their resolve by sporting T-shirts that read “I am a fool for trees.” The tree also sported a banner that read ‘No Trees, No Future’. Another banner hung from the branches.
Lending the two activists moral support, locals and citizens who care for trees held a candle light vigil at the spot later in the evening.
An advanced rope industrial climbing expert, Singh had spent 27 hours on the roof of the British parliament on the eve of the Copenhagen summit. He had also climbed a 260ft chimney at a coal power plant in Kolkata. Shivalinga is a sports climber.
Sporting “I am a fool for forests” on their T-shirts, Archana Satish and Renny Lopez sat under the tree.
“I am here as an individual who cares about trees. This place used to be beautiful, I used to come here from RT Nagar where I live,” said Archana, who runs a cafe in Indiranagar and has worked with Greenpeace for four years.
“We want to draw the attention of the people to the issue. Press for public consultation on road widening,” she said.
Renny, who did his masters in social work recently and interned with Greenpeace, will also spend Sunday night and Monday under the tree. “BBMP has to come up with a better plan for traffic management. It has to stop looking at trees as timber and treat them as assets of the city,” he said.
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