Construction of twin tunnels beneath southern ridge: Supreme Court committee recommends approval

Subject: Geography

Section: Places in news

Context:

The Central Empowered Committee (CEC) of the Supreme Court has recommended for approval the construction of underground twin tunnels beneath the southern ridge in Delhi, a protected forest area.

Details:

The project will involve the felling of around 685 trees on non-forest land, and trees in the ridge area are not expected to be affected, according to the National Highways Authority of India’s (NHAI) proposal for the tunnels.
The twin tunnels are expected to be around 4.3 km long, and around 30 m wide.
It will cover an area of 5.82 hectares under the southern ridge, which is notified as a reserved forest, and one hectare under what is ‘deemed’ forest, or an area that has not been notified but is recorded as forest.
The tunnels will cover a length of around 2.03 km under the ridge.
The Ridge is an extension of the Aravallis, and parts of it have been notified as a reserved forest.

About Delhi ridge:

Delhi Ridge, sometimes simply called The Ridge, is a ridge in the Northern Aravalli leopard wildlife corridor in the National Capital Territory of Delhi in India.
It is a northern extension of the ancient Aravalli Range, some 1.5 billion years old (by comparison, the Himalayas are “only” 50 million years old).
The ridge consists of quartzite rocks and extends from the southeast at Tughlaqabad, near the Bhatti mines, branching out in places and tapering off in the north near Wazirabad on the west bank of the river Yamuna, covering about 35 kilometres.
The Ridge acts as the “green lungs” for the city, and protects Delhi from the hot winds of the deserts of Rajasthan to the west.
It has also enabled Delhi to be the world’s second most bird-rich capital city, after Kenya’s Nairobi.
Though modest in height, the ridge acts as a watershed dividing the Indus Plain to the west from the Gangetic Plain to the east, within the Indo-Gangetic Plain.
Southern ridge:
- Southern Ridge sprawls across 6200 hectares and includes the Asola Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuary, Bandhwari and Mangar Bani forests.
- This is the least urban of the 4 segments of the Ridge, but a lot of it is village-owned or privately owned farmland.