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Plastic waste management portal, shakti vans, wild animal rescue centres in U.P. now: Forest minister
He said that ‘shakti vans’ were set up in all the districts of the state where food forests were developed by planting saplings of fruit bearing trees and added that the government was monitoring air and water quality levels
Uttar Pradesh (U.P.) forest minister Arun K Saxena on Tuesday said that his department has set up a portal for plastic waste management and was simultaneously focused on plantation in accordance with climate change needs.
He said that ‘shakti vans’ were set up in all the districts of the state where food forests were developed by planting saplings of fruit bearing trees and added that the government was monitoring air and water quality levels.
“Foundation of four wild animal rescue centres has been laid in Maharajganj, Pilibhit, Meerut and Chitrakoot. The heritage train with vistadome coaches is now operating between Dudhwa and Kartaniyaghat and a white tiger was the latest addition in the Gorakhpur zoo,” the minister said while sharing the 100-day report card of his department.
“We have placed water quality monitoring system in up and down stream of the Kondli drain in Noida to ascertain the level of pollution from Delhi side in river Yamuna,” the minister added.
He said, two central automatic air quality monitoring system each have been set up at Bareilly and Mordabad while one has been set up at Khurja. State has planted about 31-crore saplings till now and another 5-crore will be planted on August 15, he said.
“We have planted over 14-crore saplings in our forest area and particularly degraded forest areas. It has good survival rate,” said Manoj Kumar, additional chief secretary, forest and environment.
“According to the forest survey of India data sapling survival is 70% in rural areas and 80% in urban areas while in plantation in forest areas it is 90%. We intend to take forest/green cover to 15% in state from the present over 9%,” he said.
He said the plantation was in accordance with climate change. “The rising temperature in March impacted crops. We have target of sequestration of 18.55 million tonnes of carbon that basically comes from thermal power plants. We are also focused upon wetland as carbon sequestration is 4000 times more by algae than trees, if we grow algae in same area as tree for example one hectare for each,” said Singh.
