Polo ground in Raj Bhavan may be restored for blackbucks after monsoon

The sprawling 30-acre polo ground is under Raj Bhavan’s possession though it is a reserve forest.
Polo ground in Raj Bhavan may be restored for blackbucks after monsoon

CHENNAI: The polo ground in Raj Bhavan, one of the last remaining prime habitats for blackbucks in Chennai, is likely to be restored as a grassland after the monsoon season this year. Highly-placed sources told this newspaper that senior forest officials and Raj Bhavan authorities had an informal meeting and agreed to undertake the restoration work. However, there is no official confirmation.

The sprawling 30-acre polo ground is under Raj Bhavan’s possession though it is a reserve forest. For the last few years, due to lack of maintenance, the grassland turned into a scrub jungle with thorny, thick, and tall vegetation taking over, thereby drastically shrinking the blackbuck habitat in the Guindy National Park and Raj Bhavan forest complex, which are contiguous.

Meanwhile, last November and December, Raj Bhavan authorities replaced native grass with alien non-palatable Mexican grass in star garden, another blackbuck area, causing further stress to the animals. Images from Google Earth depict this, with one of them showing heavy machinery in action in December.

These developments coincided with a spike in blackbuck deaths. However, senior forest officials clarified that 20 blackbucks did not die in the past five months, as reported by TNIE recently. Between January 2021 and April 2022, 16 blackbucks died. Of the 16, nine died between November 2021 and March 2022. In comparison, only 10 blackbucks died between 2017 and 2020.

“Over the years, several open grasslands in Guindy National Park were taken over by trees. Currently, nearly 73% of the national park is a wooded forest. There is a proposal to restore some of the open grasslands,” said an official. G Sundarrajan, of Poovulagin Nanbargal, a city-based environmental advocacy group, demanded that the state forest department take over the unutilized land, especially the polo ground, from Raj Bhavan. The entire Raj Bhavan area is a reserve forest where large-scale land use and cosmetic changes cannot be made, he said.

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