Bengal green activist urges PM Modi to save country’s oldest botanical garden from Ganga erosion
- December 31, 2022
- Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
- Category: DPN Topics
Bengal green activist urges PM Modi to save country’s oldest botanical garden from Ganga erosion
Subject : Environment
Context:
- The Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Botanic Garden in Howrah has been highly impacted on its eastern fringe due to erosion by the Ganga River.
About Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Botanic Garden:
- The Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden, previously known as Indian Botanic Garden and the Calcutta Botanic Garden, is situated in Shibpur, Howrah near Kolkata.
- The gardens were founded in 1787 by Colonel Robert Kyd.
- It is under Botanical Survey of India (BSI) of Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India.
- It is India’s largest botanical garden, and is spread over 270 acres.
- The garden is one of the best and oldest landscaped gardens in the world, having more than 12,000 species.
- The best-known landmark of the garden is The Great Banyan, an enormous banyan tree (Ficus benghalensis) that is reckoned to be the largest tree in the world, at more than 330 metres in circumference.
Issue facing by the garden:
- The erosion by the Ganga may wash away parts of its fence and inner plantation soon.
- The western side of the Ganga (Hooghly) is highly susceptible owing to massive soil erosion and breaches of the embankment.
- The Kolkata Port Authority, after dredging disposes of it at a distance within the river. This leads to unevenness in the riverbed.
- River pollution due to untreated sewage from urban local bodies.
Sewage treatment projects:
- Multiple sewerage infrastructure projects in West Bengal worth over Rs 2,550 crore has been inaugurated.
- The list included seven sewerage infrastructure projects developed under the National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG).
Botanical garden
Ex-situ Conservation is one of the primary objectives of Botanical Survey of India (BSI). It is literally an ‘off site’ conservation policy that involves a couple of techniques linking the transfer of an objective species, experiencing various threats, away from its native habitat to a much safer abode, like in a Botanical Garden, Zoological Garden, Seed Bank or Gene Bank etc.
The prime goal of this technique is to adequately backing conservation strategies by guaranteeing the existence of vanishing and threatened taxa/species and the maintenance of allied genetic diversity thereof. It further supports the idea of reintroduction of species in its natural or original habitat as the species under varying threat perception are preserved in safe custody till the casual factors threatening their survival in the wild have been return to normalcy and the reintroduction becomes possible.
The preamble of Article 9 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) stresses the need of establishing Botanic Gardens as a complementary approach to in-situ conservation (conserving plant / animal species in their natural habitat) practices to conserve threatened plant species and taxa of the country of their origin and to adopt appropriate measures to ward off their extinction. In order to commensurate with the directives of CBD, BSI being the custodian of the floral wealth of the country (even well before CBD came into existence BSI has initiated work in the same lane) has set up several well networked major and minor Botanic Gardens spread across different geographical belts of the country exclusively to conserves its vast, endemic and threatened flora. In some centre’s storage of seeds, conserving pollen, storage of plant shoot in low temperature (in vitro preservation) as well as tissue culture methods is being employed to this effect.