By IANS
Srinagar : Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad led a massive Chinar plantation campaign here Saturday to save one of Kashmir’s main living heritages from extinction.
Azad planted a number of Chinar trees on the banks of the Dal Lake inside the campus of the Kashmir University in the state’s summer capital here.
“Chinar tree is a symbol of Kashmir and everything possible should be done to save this magnificent tree,” he said during the campaign.
He said there were only 40,000 Chinar trees in Kashmir today and only 7,000 of these had been planted here after the country’s independence in 1947.
“Over 10,000 Chinars are more than 400 years old and around 7,000 of the existing 40,000 such trees are less than 300 years old,” he added.
The chief minister directed the vice chancellor of the university to immediately stop all construction work that threatened the Chinar trees in the campus.
The local floriculture department provided hundreds of Chinar saplings to the district magistrates across Kashmir for plantation Saturday.
A Chinar tree is said to take 100 years to mature.