For the last three years, Padmavati Dwivedi watched GK residents put tiles or concretised circles right around the trees in her block, right up to their trunks. Concerned that the trees would not be able to absorb water or breathe, she spoke to the civic authorities, but to no avail.

Three months ago, she decided to take up the issue with a vengeance. “My son had started going to school. I had time for the long fight,” she says.

Padmavati then started what she calls a ‘fax campaign’. “I sent a fax to the chief minister every week, starting February 28,” she says. She sent letters to the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) too. Exactly two months and many correspondences later, on April 28, she got a letter from the CM’s office, saying action would be taken.

Since then, MCD workers have been working to break the concrete and tiling around a hundred trees in the locality.

But it is a battle that has just begun.

“In this area, it’s not MCD contractors who concretise the space around trees. Private builders who raise residential buildings are to blame,” says Padmavati.

“Residents ask for it because they want optimum parking space for their vehicles. Further, many feel the area is ‘cleaner’ after concretisation because refuse is dumped around the trees,” says N Block resident Naina Abrol.

“I have been getting hostile calls from residents, asking me why I am doing this, where do I live, where am I from,” says Padmavati. “People just don’t realism that when the area around a tree is concretised, the tree stops growing. It just looks green. But I’m not giving up,” she adds.

Environmentalists see this as a welcome start for a city where trees have been proven to be under stress. A study by the Forest Research Institute, commissioned by the New Delhi Municipal Council in 2007, found that due to loud noise and air pollution in the city, trees in the NDMC area, which also happen to be some of the oldest in the Capital, were under high levels of “stress”. Consequently, the NDMC announced a first-of-its-kind tree ambulance earlier this year.