Unnatural urbanisation

Urban planning must be more eco-sensitive

Last week, a 20-minute thunderstorm in Delhi uprooted many trees, some of them between 40 and 50 years old, throwing the city out of gear for hours. This chaos has become a pattern whenever a pre-monsoon storm, with high-velocity winds, hits the city. But the problem is serious enough for the Delhi High Court to take note of the callous urban planning that causes these venerable old trees, which provide the polluted city its vital green lungs, to lose their moorings. As the court rightly pointed out, the growing concretisation of the city, without providing trees sufficient breathing space around