Delhi is all set to carry out its first official full-fledged census to assess and tag trees in the Capital, with the Centre releasing ₹2.9 crores to the Forest Research Institute (FRI) for the exercise, officials aware of the matter said. The exercise will be carried out over a period of four years in three phases and is expected to commence soon.
While conducting a tree census for the entire city is mandated under the Delhi Preservation of Trees Act 1994, an official census has never taken place since the act was notified. In December 2024, the Supreme Court had asked the Delhi Tree Authority (DTA) to carry out a tree census in the capital. It had eventually asked FRI in Dehradun to oversee the census.
Providing details of the plan, Delhi government officials said the census will only cover non-forest areas and give a baseline and long-term database on Delhi’s trees in, what will essentially be, all urban spaces. The entire survey will be carried out under the guidance of three expert members —retired IFS officers Sunil Limaye and MD Sinha alongside tree expert Pradip Krishen, said one official, requesting anonymity.
Methodology of carrying out census yet to be decided
The proposal for conducting phase-1 – which consists of formulation of a methodology — was approved recently and ₹2.9 crores has been released already, said the official,adding that this phase will be completed within one year.
A second government official said that, while the DPTA calls for a tree census to be carried out across the entire city, it was however decided that this census will only cover non-forest areas.
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“The methodology is yet to be finalised by FRI and for that, FRI will also undertake a short pilot study to assess flaws or gaps. After finalising the methodology, the full-fledged census will be carried out,” the official added.
According to another official, the process to fix a methodology had already been kickstarted. “A meeting was held recently and discussions will continue over the methodology and how the census will be carried out,” said the official. A tree census is crucial as Delhi currently has no data on the number of trees it has across various neighbourhoods. More importantly, it is an important gauge of the health of trees across the city — allowing agencies to assess how many trees are healthy, concretised, lopping (tilting) or diseased.
Earlier, citizen-led censuses have been carried out
In the absence of a government-led census, several citizen-led local tree censuses have been held in Delhi’s neighbourhoods over the years.
In 2011, a citizen-led tree survey was carried out in south Delhi’s Sarvodaya Enclave. Led by tree activist and local resident Padmavati Dwivedi, along with 20 other volunteers from the neighbourhood, the census took a year to finish. The group counted 1,112 trees in total and found 394 were suffering from tilting to one side, 75 had been choked by tree guards or nails, 293 (or 41%) were completely strangled by concrete around their base, and only 172 had two feet of soil space around them.
During the exercise, each tree was marked with a crayon, and volunteers noted its location, address and health.
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A similar census was carried out 4km away at Gulmohar Park a year later. That survey found that 700 of the total 1,100 trees in the neighbourhood did not have enough soil around them to allow it to breathe and absorb nutrition.
Dwivedi carried out another census of the same neighbourhood in 2016-17, the results of which were released in 2019. It found that 77 of the trees counted in the previous census had gone “missing” — presumably felled by people or damaged during a thunderstorm. Later, in a census of the same neighbourhood by the forest department, it was found that a total of 143 trees were missing, prompting the Delhi High Court, on October 11, 2021, to direct the forest department to carry out an inspection of the neighbourhood based on the fresh census.
A 2016 census Greater Kailash Enclave-2 by locals again found concretisation to be a key issue. Roughly 60% of the trees had cement around their base and 45% had less than one feet of soil space around the base.
Ecologist Vallari Sheel, who initiated a similar census in south Delhi’s Vasant Vihar in 2016, found nearly 70% to 80% of the trees to be “unhealthy” — either concretised, damaged, tilting to one side, or diseased.
Environmental activist Bhavreen Kandhari said the use of technology can go hand-in-hand with protecting trees. “It is important to standardise a methodology which makes the best use of technology too. In a way, we can create a digital database of trees, with each tree geo-tagged so for any offence in the future, the database can be consulted,” she said.