Let us face it. Our forests are getting depleted day by day. Srinagar city in itself is expanding every year and in 15-20 years’ time, we are looking at a population of around five million souls for the Greater Srinagar area. In other parts of Kashmir population is growing day by day. We cannot lose sight of the fact that the Kashmir valley is the most densely populated area of the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir. In the erstwhile Dogra rule also Kashmir was the most densely populated area of the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir.
People are slowly and steadily encroaching upon paddy fields and forest land and the helpless government is unable to do anything. It is a natural consequence of over-population-either mass migration, vertical development or encroachment on agricultural lands and forest land. It must be borne in mind that during the Dogra regime the authorities had a stricter forest protection policy and there no laxity was shown in the implementation of the stringent laws. However, with the passage of time and changing of governments newer and newer favorable lobbies were accommodated by gifting away forest land. Just two kilometers from the city center Lal Chowk an influential person was given building permission for the construction of a hotel on Shankaracharya hillock. In tourist places like Pahalgam, Gulmarg, and Sonmarg illegal constructions have come up right under the nose of the authorities.
The need of the hour is to adopt the alternate method of creating small mini-forests which become dense in a short span of time. Many cities in South Asia are experimenting with the Miyawaki method named after Japanese botanist and plant ecology expert Akira Miyawaki- a revolutionary technique of creating forests in 20 years, which otherwise would take a century to grow to a certain denseness worthy of being called forests. We can create small mini-forests across Kashmir valley in another twenty years so that with the exponential increase in population we also have a corresponding increase in the forest cover. Besides, a more stringent forest protection policy needs to be in place to counter the menace of deforestation. A place like Kashmir cannot afford deforestation of such a massive scale. The need of the hour is to adopt alternate forestation methods like Miyawaki methods.