The felling of 234 trees on the 111-year-old campus of Amar Singh College in Srinagar, which secured the Award of Merit in the 2020 UNESCO Asia-Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation for its restoration after the 2014 floods, has triggered a furore among locals in Kashmir.
Around 182 trees were planted many decades ago to create an avenue of poplars in front of the main façade of the building; they had grown to a height of 20-30 feet. The trees lent a distinctive character to the heritage stone-and-brick structure in an Indo-British style of architecture. The highly ornamental building has gauged, handmade ‘rubber’ bricks, stylistically influenced by the then prevailing colonial trends in the region. The college, established in 1913, is also home to rare paintings and murals.
“First, they constructed a high masonry wall when the [original] plain chain link fence was transparent and looked good. Now this disaster. Wish someone would get fired for this act of vandalism. How could they do away with the poplar avenue?” Hakim Sameer Hamdani, design director of INTACH Kashmir said.
