The Supreme Court final year had set up a committee to ascertain the worth of a tree beyond just timber—there is no doubt that a tree contributes more financial and environmental worth than that contained in merely its wood. This was in the backdrop of a plea by the West Bengal government to enable the felling of 356 trees, some of which have been ‘heritage’ trees (more than a one hundred years old). The 5-member committee has pegged the worth of a tree at `74,500—`45,000 being the worth of oxygen and `20,000 being the worth of the biofertilisers it produces in a year—multiplied by its age in years in a report submitted to the apex court. Heritage trees, the report maintains, might be valued even upwards of `1 crore. Read this against the ‘polluter (tree-feller) pays’ principle, and the expense that the West Bengal government need to spend (discounting 50 trees currently felled), as per the committee, is a whopping `220 crore—the project for which the Bengal government is hunting to fell the trees is budgeted at `500 crore. This has led the apex court, which has not accepted the report and sought replies from the Centre and the Bengal government, to remark that, at this valuation, governments would go bankrupt and that the cost tag wants to be rationalised.
The report, it need to be acknowledged, has began the conversation on valuing environmental wealth provided the climate modify and the loss of diversity trajectories, improvement vision can no longer take a ‘dead wood’ method as far as environmental wealth is concerned. But, the committee-proposed valuation is a expense that just cannot be paid for most projects. For instance, is a tree to be valued only on its present age? Given some tree can ‘live forever’, how is the worth of such trees to be determined, provided felling them signifies the loss of that future financial/environmental wealth? It would maybe be far better to concentrate on the other seminal suggestions: that other options to felling need to very first be regarded and exhausted, contemporary technologies really should be used to transplant trees if feasible, and that compensatory plantation for tree-loss has to go beyond mere 5-saplings per tree felled. The committee says that for every tree with a compact crown-size that is felled, 10 saplings really should be planted 25 per tree with a medium crown-size and 50 per tree with a substantial crown-size. Perhaps, creating in diversity preservation and a greater quantity of replacement saplings for heritage trees or uncommon trees could be a far better way to worth a lost tree, along with financial expenses wherever this is viable.