Mysuru has opened a Miyawaki-style urban forest under the Bharatavana project, with two lakh plants being established across parks in K.C. Layout and Vijayanagar IV Stage to expand native greenery and improve urban habitat.
Union Finance and Corporate Affairs Minister Nirmala Sitharaman inaugurated the forest at a park in K.C. Layout on Friday. The project has included the planting of 45,000 saplings at the K.C. Layout park and another 1.5 lakh saplings across six parks in Vijayanagar IV Stage.
The project uses only native plant species, according to Sitharaman. Flowering and fruit-bearing plants have also been included to support birds and animals, giving the initiative a biodiversity component in addition to its public-space and landscaping function.
School students from a local government school participated in the planting programme. Students planted individual saplings in their own names and in the names of their mothers. The involvement of schoolchildren was presented as part of the project’s community participation model, linking the maintenance and growth of the urban forest with local residents.
Sitharaman also virtually launched a tree-planting programme in Kuvempunagar. She said similar parks had been developed in different parts of the country and that local government school students had been involved in the Mysuru initiative.
The scale of the planting is distributed across multiple neighbourhood parks rather than concentrated at a single site. The K.C. Layout park accounts for 45,000 plants, while the six parks in Vijayanagar IV Stage together account for 1.5 lakh plants. The supplied report does not specify the total land area, planting density, maintenance budget or the agency responsible for long-term upkeep.
The inauguration was attended by Karnataka district in-charge minister Dr Yathindra Siddaramaiah, Mysuru-Kodagu MP Yaduveer Krishnadatta Chamaraja Wadiyar, MLA T.S. Srivatsa, Legislative Council members C.N. Manjegowda and K. Vivekananda, Deputy Commissioner Laxmikant Reddy, City Police Commissioner Seema Latkar and Mysuru City Corporation Commissioner M.K. Savitha. State Bank of India officials Deepak Kaushik and Sanjay Kumar Jha, along with Jyoti Narayan Mohanty, were also present.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had been expected to launch the project, but a last-minute change resulted in Sitharaman inaugurating it. The next stage for the urban forest will depend on the survival and maintenance of the planted saplings across the three park clusters.
