PTI’s billion tree tsunami is really bringing in a devastation on the scale of tsunami as they manically play with the environment of the province. Khyber Pukhtunkhwa is the greenest province of Pakistan and on the face of it the tree campaign is a good initiative. But it turns out that it’s only a gimmick and nothing else. Corruption and kickback reports consumed by PTI chief minister and his ministers during this campaign is another story. The real mammoth danger is that they are planting wrong trees in the wrong places. If you want to know what I mean and what it means for the future, you just have to go to Islamabad in the spring season and ask any patient of pollen allergy. In 60’s military dictator Ayub Khan made that blunder as he wanted to portray himself a Green Man. 

 

 

He ordered CDA to plant broussonetia in numbers of hundreds of thousands. They didn’t do any research and just did it. If they only had asked the ecologists they would have known that it was a disastrous tree. Now CDA spends millions every year to eradicate these trees and still there is a long way to go. Now they are repeating the same story in Peshawar and other parts of KPK. Dodonea specie is being planted in parts of Peshawar City which is a blunder. This tree is more allergy-inducing than the Islamabad one. The only tree which is favorable to that environment is Ziziphus nummularia. It grows fast and has positive impacts on the environment. Imran Khan, CM Khattak and other leaders of PTI have been made aware of it in writing by many experts but as usual they are adamant to go ahead with it, because they have already spent billions on it and have taken their commission.