Imli captioned Cassia fistula in UT calendar draws flak from activists

CHANDIGARH: There seems to be no end to environment department putting wrong information on public documents. It has been found that the department has wrongly mentioned tamarind (Imli) as Cassia fistula on the table calendar for 2018.
The calendar carrying wrong information has been circulated by UT environment department in all offices and schools.
When asked, environment director Santosh Kumar said, “These are two different things.It is certainly an error.”
The error, however, has drawn a lot of criticism from city-based environmentalists.
Horticulturalist Rahul Mahajan who spotted the error commented that this ignorance by the department is the reason why the entire tamarind stretch has no imli trees anymore.
“Firstly, there are hardly any imli trees left in the city and now in this calendar they are showing a picture of imli (tamarind) tree captioned Cassia fistula,which is actually Amaltas. They have not planted a single imli tree in the last 10 years and the trees on imli road in Sector 26/7 have vanished. Only a few plants are left on the stretch,” he said.
He added, “Wrong information is spread only when proper homework is not done. Previously, the department had mentioned interlobium as imli, and later banned pesticides were recommended for urban gardening.”
NK Jhingan of environment society of India, Chandigarh, held similar views. “All the imli trees have died. They have not even replaced these trees with imli saplings and have instead put other varieties. This is the case with many other varieties as well. This is affecting the character of the city.”