Afforesting Tirusulam hill from muddy beginnings

CHENNAI: It was a December morning in Chennai. The year was 1986. TN Seshan, India_s much celebrated electoral process reformer, was stepping out of the domestic terminal of the Meenambakkam International Airport. He was on an official visit to the city as the Secretary of the Union Ministry of

Environment & Forests.

As was the customary protocol, he was greeted with a bouquet at the VIP gate by the Additional Chief Conservator of Forests of the State_s Social Forestry Wing S Subbarayulu and his team. There was no flyover or the elevated Metro Rail line at the airport those days.

From the exit point, Seshan could command a full view of the Tirusulam hillock that stood as a barren eye sore, bereft of any vegetation.

Seshan's green eye

The green man in Seshan, a no-nonsense bureaucrat, woke up suddenly. He wondered why this hillock, probably a prominent landmark of the city for international travellers and tourists from rest of India, had been left to languish in such a state.

Seshan enquired with the forest chief whether the Forest department could do something _urgently_ to remediate the status, particularly because the State was known to have pioneered greening efforts in its numerous revenue poromboke hills, spread across the State under the Social Forestry programme. He questioned the foresters about the extent of forests in TN, and whether the State had been inching anywhere near the national goal of one third of land under forest cover, as envisioned in the 1952 National Forest Policy.

The forest area in TN, at that time, was a meagre 13.5% as assessed by the Forest Survey of India. Forest officers got the message. With the top priority tag, the Forest department, within months, drew up a plan to afforest the hill, and also the adjacent Pallavaram hills. Field staff were asked to survey the area and take all preparatory activities including raising the nursery stock so that planting could be completed before the monsoon months of 1987.

K Sivagnanam, retired Assistant Conservator of Forests who was a Forest Range Officer in the project, recounts: _The Tirusulam hillock, by then, had been severely eroded due to long-time granite quarrying that left the faces of the slopes fully exposed. A part of the hillock had been occupied by the Tower Testing Research Station (TTRS), a CSIR-SERC institution and a shooting range of military. We had gone through the rigmarole of obtaining permission from the concerned agencies such as the military, TTRS, revenue department and the panchayat

Labour rates

With lot of boulders and pebbles to encounter and barely a few inches of top soil, the recalcitrant site characteristics of Tirusulam hillock threw a formidable challenge for foresters to devise an unconventional and site-specific planting strategy.

Sivagnanam adds: _We had to impress upon our forest bosses to allow special labour rates for digging the plantation pits in view of enervating field conditions. In those days, the power of sanctioning Forest Schedule of Rates for forestry work was with the Conservator of Forests of the circle.

S Sankaramoorthy, the Social Forestry Conservator, immediately organised a work study to arrive at specific rates for digging pits in the hillock, which worked out to 4 times the prevailing rate for the pits of same specification for the district. Once it was sanctioned, there was no looking back.

_Since 1987 was declared a drought year, funds were made available under the Drought Prone Area Programme for the project. I had to source labour from Chengalpattu, Arakonam and Tiruvallur,_ he states.

Plantation in the slopes

The senior officers were enthusiastic about the project. Construction of random rubble check walls to arrest soil erosion, selection of suitable plant species, provision of special inputs in the planting pits, timely execution of the tasks as per calendar of operations, and closer monitoring of progress of works by senior officers helped to establish a successful plantation in the slopes of the barren hillock.

Tree species that are adapted to establish even in extremely poor site conditions such as Albizzia lebbeck (vagai), Anona squamosa (sita), Azadirachta indica (vembu), Cassia fistula (sarakoonai), Cassia siamea (manjakonnai), Derris indica (pungan), Tamarindus indica (puli), Wrightia tinctoria (veppalai), cuttings of Lannea coromandelica (odhiyan) and Ficus bengalensis (aal) were planted at 5x5 metre spacing. The district forest officer T Ramakrishnan even mustered Ficus seedlings from the nearby Vellore division.

It was an onerous task for the forest staff to keep away the stray cattle from grazing, and browsing the young plants in the initial years of establishment. With stringent protection given to the area, seedlings developed into trees and assisted in the natural regeneration through seed sources.

The resultant was that the landscape developed into a thriving green oasis within a few years.

Urban green spaces

Seshan might have subsequently flown over the Tirusulam hillock several times when his Chennai-bound aircraft landed at the airport from the east coast end.

From the comfort of his window seat, he too would have had a bird_s eye view of the Tirusulam hillock, completely clothed in green. Thirty-five years down the memory lane, it has been a dream that came true.

As of now, a weary traveller emerging from the airport terminal is soothed by the green swathe of Tirusulam hillock, though a panoramic view is obliterated by the flyover and the Metro Rail line. All of these have been made possible due to the vision of the green man in Seshan.

Yet, the current Google map paints a different pattern to the whole episode. Besides visiting the hills in person, I tried to look at the current status of Tirusulam hillock through the eyes of Google Earth, which spots the presence of some extent of open spaces _ could be a leftover/ failed patch or boulder terrain _ amid the green canopy. Tamil Nadu Forest department has a rich experience of vegetating such openings in the forest with most appropriate species by a technique that is called _gap planting_. There are many such isolated hillocks in the vicinity of the city, which sport appreciable greenery in their outer slopes but with gaps in their interiors.

The recently launched Green Tamil Nadu Mission could well provide an opportunity to tackle the gaps in such urban green spaces.

Who is TN Seshan?

Tirunellai Narayana Iyer Seshan (famously known as TN Seshan) is widely regarded as the man who single-handedly changed the face of Indian election system in the 1990s. Seshan served as Chief Election Commission from December 12, 1990 to December 11, 1996. Known for his no-nonsense attitude, Seshan introduced a list of over 100 malpractices during elections, including distribution of liquor, bribing voters, and use of religion in speech by leaders during election campaigning and several others. Enforcing a limit on money spent on election campaigning, introduction of Model Code of Conduct and most importantly the Voter ID card were some of the steps he had taken. Seshan served as the 18th Cabinet Secretary, the senior-most position in the Indian civil service hierarchy, in 1989 and later served as a member of Planning Commission. He even contested the 1997 Presidential election, but lost to KR Narayanan. Seshan passed away in 2019. He was 86. 

(The writer is the former Principal Chief Conservator of Forests, Chennai)