Thar Million Tree Program a miracle in the desert

(Staff Report):-

Near the Thar Block-II integrated mine-power project located in the Thar desert, a million trees and shrubs are striving to grow their roots underground deeply to store water and survive in the harsh arid environment, showing a kind of enduring resilience and vitality, and bringing a ray of hope to the people and creatures living here.

This is a desert garden of 100 acres created by Thar Block-II integrated mine-power project under the Thar Million Tree Program in 2017 and has been expanding since then. The annual carbon dioxide reduction from the plants is about 600 tons per year.

It’s hard to maintain a garden in the desert, and even harder to do so near a coalfield, but the team of the project has made it with tenacious efforts and a spirit of endurance.

The area where Thar coalfield is located has a subtropical desert climate, featured with little to no rainfall and generally hot temperatures year-round. The Chinese constructors who first arrived here were ‘greeted’ by nothing but sand and dust all over the sky. They had to live in makeshift homes made from containers, obtain water from deep wells dug by themselves and face load-shedding from time to time.

Things have changed a lot now. With 6 years of devotion to tree planting in the desert, the landscape in this area has been transformed significantly. Seven types of desert plants, such as Rhodes Grass, Aloe vera, and Pennicum had been planted year by year, starting from one tree to a patch of plants to the sea of green. “Due to the harsh and arid environment here, we need to set up seeding room first to cultivate saplings, and then transplant them outdoors after irrigation,” Liu Zhe, commercial manager of CMEC Pakistan Engineering (Pvt) Ltd told in an interview.

Adopting this method, the team had also developed an ecological garden (50 acres), a green park (65 acres), an olive forest (10 acres), and a jujube orchard. The vast area of plants brushes the barren land with a refreshing green, distinguishing it from other places in the Thar desert.