Dream of urban forest turns sour as KMC cancels agreement

A few years back, the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation’s (KMC) amenity plot ST-13 in the Park Lane area in Clifton was a barren place that was being used as a dumping ground for garbage. Today, the plot is famous for its verdure as there are dense pockets of trees and plants of multiple species spread over three acres. Work is also under way to create a small lake here.

Entering one of the groves, one feels a splash of coolness as being filtered through the canopy, sunrays lose their intensity before they touch the ground. The verdure at the plot does not resemble plantations that one sees in other parks of the city. The trees and plants here are not planted in rows and do not form any organised sequence. They rather resemble a small jungle and the plot is rightly known as the urban forest.

Forty-five-year-old Shahzad Qureshi, a textile engineer by profession, is the brains behind the project. He used to live in the vicinity of the plot and attempted to turn it into an urban forest after the deadly heatwave of 2015. For the purpose, he sought verbal permission from the KMC’s then director general parks Niaz Somroo and started plantation on the plot.

“There were mounds of construction debris in the plot back then,” he recalled. By April 2017, he entered into a five-year agreement with the municipality for the adoption of the park by forming a private company M/s Urban Forest. However, things have not gone smooth since then as the KMC cancelled the agreement with Qureshi twice, claiming that the latter failed to develop the park as per the agreement.

Qureshi was first stopped to continue his work at the plot on September 14, 2018. A letter issued by the KMC stated that the adopter of the plot had failed to develop it as a public park despite taking more than one-and-a-half years.

However, the adoption was restored in October that year, after Qureshi assured the KMC of developing the park in the shortest possible time. Now, the corporation has again cancelled the agreement on the same grounds that the entrepreneur had failed to fulfil his commitments, leaving no option for the KMC but to cancel the agreement with him and take back the possession of the plot.

Responding to this, Qureshi shared that he never heard from the corporation and it parks department during the last one year. He told The News that when the agreement was revoked for the first time in October last year, Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P) Convener Dr Khalid Maqbool Siddiqi intervened to get it restored.

According to Qureshi, after the resumption of the adoption agreement last year, they had achieved an enormous success in developing the plot into an urban forest. He wrote a letter, a copy of which is available with The News, to the DG parks informing him how he had created 1,800 square metres of a planting bed on the severely degraded land with 54 tons of biomass, by digging and mixing the ground up to one meter down.

“The park ground was filled with construction debris and mountains of garbage which we have been constantly removing before planting trees,” he wrote. He explained that they had planted a total of 15,000 native trees of about 55 different species at the park, all of which had been growing.

“Our plants from the last year are now over 18-feet tall,” the letter reads and highlights how they created a large organic vegetable garden, with the help of horticulturist Tofiq Pasha.

The urban forest, he said, now attracts all kinds of birds, butterflies, bees and insects that had not been seen in the last 20 years in the area – a conspicuous species among them are weaver birds that are famous for their peculiar nests.

During the last 10 months, over 6,000 people visited the urban forest and witnessed it growing, Qureshi claimed. Children from 25 different schools have visited the park to learn about it and planted saplings there, he said, adding that they had recently received 10,000 saplings from the Sindh Engro Coal Mining Company through the Thar Foundation as an acknowledgement of their work.

Meanwhile, Journalist Afia Salam shared that Qureshi never wanted to turn the barren plot into something similar to ordinary parks of the KMC that are devoid of trees. Qureshi had a target of 50,000 trees, of which he has already planted 15,000 and most of them are now fully grown, she remarked.

Perturbed at the KMC’s decision to cancel the agreement, the journalist asked in which park being administered by the corporation, it had been able to grow 18-foot high trees during the last three years.

Qureshi shared that in his letter of interest, he had mentioned an ‘urban forest park’. In the forest, he said, trees grow and it get dense as they are not pruned. The incumbent DG parks KMC, Afaq Mirza, was not available for comments, despite repeated attempts by The News.

Miyawaki method

The textile engineer used the Miyawaki method to grow the forest, which has been successfully used in India. He invited Shubhendu Sharma from India who owns a company, Afforest, to design urban forests. He explained that through this method, the growth of plants increases 10 times more without using any artificial means.

“We mimic or replicate a natural forest through this method,” he said and added that the plan was to plant 50,000 plants in the three-acre park where at a time, three to five saplings of plants grow together on one-square-metre.

“We plant mixed native species only,” he said and added that he grew plants in three layers – shrub layer, sub-tree layer and tree layer that is also known as canopy layer. In order to add fertility to soil, he explained that they mix 30 kilogrammes of rice husk, bagas [sugarcane waste] and cow dung and use the mixture one-metre deep in every square metre. “This powers the soil,” he said.

“In three years, it looks like a 10-year-old forest. In 10 years, it looks like a 100-year-old forest,” he said and added that to achieve that, they would have to water the trees for three years, after which they became self-sustaining.