Guwahati’s Vanishing Tree Cover: Concrete Above, Silence Below

Guwahati‘s Vanishing Tree Cover:Concrete Above, Silence Below

RAHUL ROHAN PAUL

There is a particular kind of old tree you notice only after it is gone. Not because it was spectacular in any obvious way, but because something about the light changes on that stretch of road, and you realise you had been walking under it for years without consciously registering what it was doing for you. Guwahati has been having that realisation repeatedly over the last three years, and the city has not quite found the language to sit with it yet.

This is not a simple story about development being bad. Nobody who has spent forty minutes stuck in traffic between Lal Ganesh and Cycle Factory would make that argument without embarrassment. The Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee Flyover, inaugurated on May 22, 2026, connecting Cycle Factory junction to Lal Ganesh Bazar across 2.8 kilometres of three-lane elevated road built at a cost of Rs.376 Cr, is a real answer to a real problem.

Thousands of commuters who once crawled through one of Guwahati’s densest corridors, losing hours to a stretch that should take minutes, now move without stopping. The infrastructure is real, the benefit is real, and dismissing it would be dishonest. But the trees that came down to build it were also real. And the question that nobody in an inauguration speech has managed to fully answer is a straightforward one: was there another way, and did anyone seriously look for it.

Seven Thousand Trees and the Silence around that Number

The numbers deserve to be read slowly, because they move fast enough that the mind tends to let them pass without landing. Over 7,000 trees were felled in Guwahati in 2023 alone to accommodate the expansion of National Highway 37 and the construction of new flyovers, according to documented reporting on infrastructure clearances across the city. And that figure only counts trees removed with official permission or reported to the Assam forest department.

The actual number, accounting for unauthorised felling, is almost certainly higher. Between 2020 and 2024, across Assam as a whole, approximately 94,000 trees were felled for highway expansion alone. A 2026 Sentinel report found that against this scale of removal, only 784 saplings had been planted where compensatory norms required roughly 70,000. It is the kind of number that should have triggered an inquiry. Instead it appeared in a report and moved on.

In Guwahati specifically, the losses accumulate block by block. Around 3,000 trees were felled in the city and its adjoining areas over a three-year period for flyover and highway construction, according to a Times of India report cited during the Dighalipukhuri controversy. In the Panikhaiti area, 40 trees were uprooted for a single flyover project.

Along the Brahmaputra riverbank, 21 trees came down for an Inland Water Transport project. Twenty-five were cut for a beautification initiative by Guwahati Smart City Limited. Seven were felled inside the Assam Assembly campus at Dispur. Around 2,500 trees were removed along the 16.5 kilometre stretch of NH-37 in 2022 when the four-lane highway was expanded to six lanes.

At least 30 trees were reported cut in Uzanbazar, a neighbourhood that older residents remember as one of the most densely canopied corridors in the city, the kind of street where the branches of trees on opposite footpaths met overhead and made the walk from one end to the other feel like moving through something deliberately designed for human comfort. That shade is gone now, replaced by open sky above a widened road that heats faster and cools later than anything the canopy once allowed.

The city lost 12 square kilometres of tree cover between 2001 and 2023, an area roughly the size of London’s Heathrow Airport. Assam’s forest loss over the same two decades is equivalent to twice the area of Delhi, the highest rate of tree cover loss recorded anywhere in India.

These are not environmental abstractions. They are the numbers behind the heat that Guwahati residents feel more intensely each May, behind the flooding that worsens each monsoon as root systems that once absorbed water are replaced by concrete that simply cannot.

When a Yellow Cross on Bark Becomes the Last Warning

The most charged confrontation in this slow accumulation came in October 2024, when local authorities marked trees along the banks of Dighalipukhuri tank with yellow paint for the construction of the Dighalipukhuri to Noonmati flyover, a 5.44 kilometre, four-lane corridor being built at Rs 852.68 crore, the longest planned flyover in the state. Some of those trees were estimated to be 200 years old.

The sight of yellow crosses painted on bark that had been standing beside one of Guwahati’s most historically significant ponds, surrounded by the Gauhati High Court, Rabindra Bhawan, the State Museum, Handique College, and parts of Cotton University, produced a reaction that years of quieter felling had not.

Hundreds of residents came out. College students from Cotton University joined them. Singers, actors, and civil society members held a night vigil at Dighalipukhuri to physically prevent the felling. A citizen group called Save Dighalipukhuri was formed before dawn. A petition was submitted to the Chief Justice of the Gauhati High Court requesting suo motu cognisance. The High Court issued notice to the state government.

The Chief Minister said the government would reconsider. Eventually, PWD officials met with protest representatives and assured them that a revised plan would limit felling to eight to ten trees rather than the original number. The citizens had moved a flyover, at least slightly, at least for now.

What the protest also revealed, through an RTI filed by a retired engineer, was that no environmental impact assessment had been carried out for the Dighalipukhuri flyover before construction began. That single fact sits at the centre of everything else. An EIA is not a bureaucratic formality.

It is the mechanism by which a city is forced to confront, in writing and in public, exactly what it is trading away for what it is gaining. Without it, the trees do not appear as a cost on any ledger that matters. They are simply there one morning and gone the next, and the accounting moves on without them.

What Two Centuries of Growth Cannot Be Compensated For

Assam singer Papon, speaking after the Dighalipukhuri controversy, put the argument plainly: beautiful cities worldwide are celebrated for their greenery and historic architecture, yet Guwahati was losing trees over 150 years old in the name of development.

The Chief Minister’s counter was equally direct: if one tree is cut, ten are planted, and that is the norm everywhere. Both positions were stated with conviction. Neither engaged with what the other was actually saying, and that gap is precisely where Guwahati’s tree cover has been disappearing into.

The compensatory planting norm exists on paper and is routinely ignored in practice, as the sapling figures make clear. But even a perfect compliance record would not resolve the deeper problem. A tree that has been growing for two centuries beside a heritage pond is not a unit of greenery that can be transferred elsewhere. It is a creature of its specific soil, its specific water table, its specific relationship with the birds and insects that have built their lives around it over generations. You cannot move that history to a nursery on the city’s edge and call it conservation. What you can do, and what has not been done here with anything approaching consistency, is require that every infrastructure project demonstrate, before the first pillar goes in, that the alignment genuinely cannot avoid the trees in its path.

Development is needed. Guwahati’s traffic is genuinely punishing, its road infrastructure has lagged decades behind its population growth, and the people who gain the most from smoother commutes are often not the ones with the loudest voices in any environmental debate. All of that is true. But a city that has lost the equivalent of Heathrow Airport in tree cover over two decades, that builds flyovers without environmental assessments, and that watches its oldest trees come down one project at a time without a single comprehensive urban forest policy to set limits, is not making a difficult choice between two competing goods. It is deferring the choice entirely, and leaving the consequences in the air, quite literally, for everyone underneath to breathe.

MAHABAHU MIRROR

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