After the Supreme Court rapped the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) on tree cutting , the AAP government formed a fact finding committee of three ministers over the felling of 1,100 trees in the Ridge area allegedly without permission.  According to Delhi Environment Minister Gopal Rai, the decision was taken in a meeting of the ministers held at Secretariat, in view of non- submission of the status report on cutting of the trees at Satbari (Chhatarpur) lying on the Ridge.

The committee comprising the ministers Atishi, Saurabh Bharadwaj and Imran Hussain will submit its report to the forest minister, the statement said.

 The report will then be submitted to the Supreme Court which is hearing the matter, before the next date of hearing, Rai said.

 He charged that the 1,100 trees were cut by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) illegally and without due permission.

 "The e-mails of DDA engineers reveal that the trees were cut on the verbal instructions of the Delhi Lieutenant Governor," Rai claimed.

 He said in a meeting with the forest department on June 26, officials told him that the DDA was issued notices in March on the matter but it did respond.

 Rai said he directed the forest department to submit a detailed report on the matter but it was not done. After a written communication to submit the report on June 28, the officers again did not comply, the minister said.

 "In such a circumstance, the meeting of ministers decided to form a three-member committee to give detailed report about the tree felling," he said.  Rai added that the Kejriwal government is committed to protect and increase the green cover of Delhi.

 Ahead of 2020 Assembly polls, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had issued 10 guarantees, including planting two crore saplings in five years, he recalled.  The forest minister said that the cooperation of various agencies, Delhi government has already managed to plant two crore saplings in four years itself. For the next one year, the government has decided to plant another 64 lakh saplings.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday directed the Delhi government and the Tree Authority under the Delhi Preservation of Trees Act (DPTA) to initiate action against the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) for illegal felling of trees at the south Delhi ridge area and further deepened its probe to ascertain the role of the Lieutenant Governor (LG) Vinai Kumar Saxena in ordering the felling of trees, keeping the matter for further consideration on July 12.

Probing deeper into who ordered the felling of the trees, the court pulled up DDA for not producing records of the LG’s visit to the site on February 3 as an email written by a senior DDA official claimed that orders for felling trees were given by Saxena following the visit.

Granting the body a week’s time to produce the records, the bench of justices AS Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan said, “There should not be any attempt to shield anybody. You (DDA) admit there was a visit by LG and now it seems there is an effort to conceal information.

The manner in which the entire thing has happened, we are entitled to have doubts. It is very difficult to believe there was no record kept of the LG visit. We are not happy with this approach.”