ISLAMABAD: Bright minds in the Capital Development Authority (CDA) never cease to surprise the disenfranchised citizens of Islamabad with their wondrous schemes, it seems.

On Thursday they begin a campaign to plant 500,000 trees in and around the city - even at places they know they will have to uproot them later.

Chairman Prime Minister’s Task Force Faisal Sakhi Butt will lead the ceremony at a section of Khayaban-i-Iqbal, popularly known as Margalla Road, in Sector F-10.

Selected for planting of more than 10,000 saplings, this strip of land running along the road is to be built up as commercial area - an extension of Blue Area. And a massacre would await the young trees when construction begins.

It may look perverted planning to common sense, but not to the wisemen of CDA.

“When the time comes, we will remove (the trees being planted today) and transplant them at a new location,” Dr Suleman Sheikh,

Director-General Environment in CDA, told Dawn to calm down the alarmists.

And the species have been carefully chosen with that eventuality in mind – Pine, Kachnar, Fiddle Wood and Ficus, he assured, informing that 15,000 of them had already been planted at the site and 7,500 more would be planted during the campaign.

Sadly, his assurance is more likely to wither away as did the tall pine trees that CDA transplanted in 2005-06 after public anger boiled over the felling of hundreds of magnificent trees for widening of roads and construction of underpasses and flyovers in Islamabad.

On that occasion the CDA had offered the excuse that the trees were wrongly planted on land specified and kept for expanding the city’s road network.

A senior officer in the CDA’s planning wing was candid enough, on condition of anonymity, to admit that CDA was repeating a mistake.

“We are going for the same experiment which failed in the past and brought us bad name,” he said. What he feared was that this time a Supreme Court intervention might bring shame also.

But that possibility lies in the future. For today, the CDA top brass can celebrate its grand tree plantation drive with social activists from the civil society and NGOs and enthusiastic children from over 100 schools.

CDA spokesman Ramzan Sajid said 500,000 trees are to be planted during the drive, divided equally between the urban and rural areas of Islamabad. In the urban area, the saplings will be planted along the roads and in parks, playfields and markets while in the rural area the exercise would concentrate on inhabited localities, the catchment area of Simly Dam and on the Margalla Hills.