Ranchi: The officers of the Forest department cleared the entire bamboo forest spread over 78 acres to make an eco-park here and also cut down about 500 eucalyptus and sal trees planted among the bamboos in Chakulia in East Singhbhum District of Jharkhand.
This park is being built at a cost of 14 crores, which may increase.
The boundary of this park being built in Amalagoda, adjacent to Chakulia, is ready and about 40 percent of the road network of paver’s blocks has also been woven.
The special thing is that the forest department had planted the bamboo forest here about 20 years ago.
The forest department has cut bamboo and trees, uprooted them with JCB and burnt them so that no sign of trees remains.
Still, the stumps of burnt trees and the roots of hundreds of bamboo are scattered there in many places.
Hundreds of bamboo and sal trees are still planted within the boundary at the back of the park.
This shows what the forest would have been like in the rest of the area.
This fact is also being confirmed from a two years old Google image.
The laborers working there said that the cleaning of that part is yet to be done.
Obviously there is a plan to cut the remaining forest.
Komal Lochan Bera and Shashank Shekhar Barik of Amalagoda said – There was a very dense bamboo forest here.
There were eucalyptus and sal trees in between but now nothing is left.
The head of the village, Arun Barik, said that it was true that there was a bamboo forest planted by the forest department, but in the gram sabha held in 2014, the forest department was told that sal trees would not be cut.
However, several villagers, including Prakash Makud, ward member of Amalagoda, told us that no permission was taken from the gram sabha for the park.