The Ministry of environment and forests has slammed Mayawati government’s proposal to construct an eightlane expressway along the bank of the Upper Ganga Canal.
The ministry said the project, if pursued, would lead to the destruction of around one lakh trees along the 148- km stretch from Sanauta in Gautam Budh Nagar to Purkazi in Muzaffarnagar district near the UP- Uttarakhand border.
The area also comprises two protected forests and a dense vegetation cover.
A report prepared by the ministry’s regional office in Lucknow pointed that the project was bound to affect the habitat of some endangered species such as snakes, blue bulls, monitor lizards, porcupines, foxes and jackals.
The Centre criticised the UP government for not making a proper environmental impact assessment of the project.
“ The state government is actively going ahead with the project that has huge repercussions on the forest cover and wildlife habitat in one of the richest forest stretches of UP,” a senior minister official said.
He said there were very few good forests in UP of which many were destroyed over past few years. “ There are very few measures to conserve them. Forests seem nowhere on their priority,” he added.
The report said the Upper Ganga Canal is a “ lifeline of a large track of Western UP” as it provides irrigation to the area.
The expressway is feared to pollute the canal that supplies water to Delhi, Noida and Ghaziabad. The Sonia Vihar treatment plant in Delhi and the Pratap Vihar plant are also fed through the canal.
In the meantime, work on the project is going on in full flow. The state government has conducted a survey and completed the demarcation work on the right bank of the canal for the expressway.
Sources said the state government is in the middle of the tender process and the parties to which the work would be awarded have also been finalised.
The UP government had submitted four proposals for seeking forest clearance from the ministry’s Lucknow office.
“ We returned the proposals and asked them to submit a consolidated proposal.
Since the area is more than 40 hectares, they will have to submit the plan directly to the ministry in Delhi,” chief conservator of forests from the ministry’s Lucknow regional office, Azam Zaidi, said.
The ministry also expressed doubts on the need for the expressway as two roads already connect Ghaziabad, Meerut and Muzaffarnagar with Uttarakhand.
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