Children will clean Lalbagh this summer

Children will clean Lalbagh this summer

The Hindu

Bangalore: Hundreds of children will be in Lalbagh during their summer holidays this year. Not to play or have a picnic; both are prohibited over most parts of this park now.

\The schoolchildren have volunteered to help the "Clean Lalbagh, Green Lalbagh" campaign launched recently by the Horticulture Department.

Involving children in the move to keep the sprawling park clean will help them learn more about the environment, the department feels.

Lalbagh Botanical Gardens has close to 1,600 rare species of trees, several shrubs and flowering plants collected from different countries, a glasshouse and a lake.

The children will not just help in asking visitors to use the waste bins and avoid throwing around plastic waste: use of plastics has been banned within the park.

They will assist in gardening work, watch and identify birds, help put up guards around trees, conduct a tree census, list the different species and make full use of the Lalbagh Library to get more information about the plants they will care for.

Horticulture Director G.K. Vasanth Kumar says: "The students can get practical information about the environment and its protection. They will get to know the history of Lalbagh (first planned by Hyder Ali), its monuments including the watch tower built by the city's founder Kempe Gowda and the varied types of trees and other botanical species."

The programmes spread over two weeks will end with a painting contest organised by the Bangalore Garden Trust.

Lalbagh attracts around 15,000 visitors, including tourists from overseas, on weekdays and more on weekends and holidays. As the number of visitors steadily increases, the amount of plastic throwaways and other biodegradable waste has been increasing.

These cannot be easily dealt with by the available sanitation staff, and during the heavy rainfall last year, many drains got clogged and the lake in the park overflowed. The Karnataka State Pollution Control Board has now declared Lalbagh a "plastics free zone".