NEW DELHI: The government on Tuesday accorded its approval to transplant 487 trees for construction of an Executive Council, as part of Central Vista redevelopment plan, for which a gazette notification will be issued soon, said officials. According to the officials, the file was pending approval of Environment Minister Gopal Rai, who has given his nod to the same.
“The file for granting permission for tree-felling at plot numbers — 36 and 38 — to construct the Executive Council got the minister’s approval on Tuesday, after which it was sent to be signed by the secretary in order to be published as a gazette notification,” said a senior official. The construction work of the already undertaken projects as well as for those pending permissions is being done in a fast-track manner, said officials. “All the projects are time-bound and may even be completed before the given deadlines,” the official said.
The Delhi State Environment Impact Assessment Authority (SEIAA) earlier granted the environmental clearance to the Central Public Works Department (CPWD), which is carrying out the redevelopment to transplant 487 trees for the Executive Council, which will house the new Prime Minister’s Office, the Cabinet Secretariat, the India House and the National Security Council Secretariat.
Earlier, the Delhi State Expert Appraisal Committee (SEAC), which vets the proposals before they are sent to the SEIAA, raised concerns over the CPWD’s plan to remove an “excessively high proportion” of trees from the site.Later, the CPWD revised the proposal, reducing the number of trees to be transplanted from 630 to 487, while increasing the number of trees to be retained to 320 from 154.
The SEIAA, however, had set-up a sub-committee to review the site plan and examine the implementation of the government’s tree transplantation policy in order to “retain more trees”. The government had notified the transplantation policy in 2020, which requires construction agencies to transplant a minimum of 80 per cent of the trees affected by the development works, while the benchmark tree survival rate at the end of one year of tree transplantation must be 80 per cent.