THATTA: Minister for culture, adviser to chief minister on environment and a large number of members of civil society planted hundreds of saplings and participated in picking garbage littering legendary Keenjhar Lake’s embankments to mark the World Environment Day on Saturday.

The minister Syed Sardar Ali Shah and the adviser Murtaza Wahab said at a press conference after the programme organised by Sindh Environmental Protection Agency, which concluded with a seminar on Eco-system restoration that Pakistan Peoples Party government was bringing a green revolution in Sindh by launching an aggressive campaign to plant maximum number of trees.

They believed that federal government’s disinterest in implementing 1991 water accord and its failed socio-economic policies had led Sindh to an uncertain future. Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf government’s policies would ultimately do irreparable harm to small federating units.

Murtaza Wahab said that the campaign for green Sindh was being launched on the directives of PPP chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, who himself was an advocate for cleaner environment and attached great importance to clean and green surroundings. Trees were being planted across the province on his instructions to make Sindh lush green, he said.

He said that one million saplings had been planted in Thar and millions had been planted in other areas with the help of local people and institutions, which was a great achievement. “If we plant 50 million trees, effects of global warming in our province can be greatly reduced,” he said.

He said the environment department should also plant more trees in recreational places and regretted that the federal government had not given even a single rupee for the development of recreational places in Sindh. The Solid Waste Management Board should be expanded across the province to solve the problem of garbage lifting, he said.

Sardar Shah stressed the need for creating awareness among masses about environmental issues and argued that the term global warming was now truly happening before their eyes and it had become global warning. The time was appropriate now to make the earth green, he said.

He said the federal government should fulfill its obligation to release maximum quantum of water downstream Kotri barrage to keep the delta alive and 52 small and big forests along both banks of Indus as well as mangroves forests along deltaic stretch.

The minster and the adviser said that if PTI government remained blind to the most sensitive issue of legitimate water share of Sindh history would never forgive it such criminal negligence.

Thatta PPP secretary information Syed Mehmood Alam Shah and joint secretary Imtiaz Qureshi were critical of the PTI government’s claim of planting one billion trees in the country and said the claim was result of federal government’s mechanism for fake propagation and would never materialise.

Published in Dawn, June 7th, 2021