Take a walk, go green

Did you know that walking 1km every week for a year is equal to planting one tree? Though it sounds incredulous, it is true.

“Every year, a tree absorbs 12kg of carbon dioxide. A car emits 0.25kg of carbon dioxide per kilometre. By avoiding 50 kilometres of car travel every year, you are actually functioning like a walking talking tree and making the environment a bit greener,” explains Vivek Gilani, an engineer who is promoting ‘walking’ in the city for a greener cause.

In order to promote safe walking in the city, a group of citizens have come together to launch ‘The Walking Project’ in conjunction with the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, the Rio+20 Earth Summit, that kickstarted on June 20.

Under this project, five key roads each of the 24 wards in Mumbai will be adopted for studying their walk-ability index.

“Walk-ability index is determined by measuring the width of the footpath, it’s quality, positioning of utility boxes like the telephone and electricity boxes, encroachment and vehicle parking on the footpath,” said Rishi Aggarwal, an environmentalist and member of project.

“We will be forwarding a proposal to the commissioner of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation to involve the civic body in mapping road data to make walking safe,” he said, adding that unlike Delhi and Pune that have adopted ‘street guidelines’ to make walking safer, there are no such dedicated policies in Mumbai.

Nearly 20 lakh people flood out of Churchgate and CST railway stations every morning to reach their workplace. Eighteen lakh of these people prefer to walk it up to their offices every day. “In the A ward, we are planning to adopt arterial roads like Shaheed Bhagat Singh Marg, P D’Mello Road, Veer Nariman Road, Marine Drive and Maharshi Karve Road among others in the study, to test how feasible it is to walk safely on them,” said Kunti Oza of Clean Mumbai Foundation.