The photographs reached my phone on the morning of April 12, 2026. A friend from Mochwa Baghe Mehtab sent images of workers moving along Canal Road with axes, targeting the mulberry trees that had lined this embankment since the 1970s. 

Sawdust covered the ground where six trees had already fallen. The remaining fifty-six stood in the path of chainsaws scheduled to return the following day.

I posted the images to social media within the hour. The response came rapidly: nearly one lakh views, messages flooding in from sericulture workers, environmentalists, and families who remembered the oxygen shortages of 2021. 

Director Ajaz Ahmad Bhat of the Jammu and Kashmir Sericulture Development Department was in Delhi attending to his wife’s medical treatment when the calls reached him. He issued a stop-work order the following morning, canceling the permission his own department had granted three weeks earlier. The remaining trees stayed standing because enough people raised their voices at the right moment.

The confrontation revealed a deeper conflict between development imperatives and environmental law. 

The Roads and Buildings Department’s Rajbagh division had sought removal of ninety-two mulberry trees in November 2025, citing road-widening needs along the Bund Road corridor. After field verification, the Sericulture Department approved sixty-two trees for auction on March 20, 2026. 

The contract, awarded to a local contractor for Rs 1.10 crores, specified an eighteen-month completion window. I examined the tender documents, and they contained no environmental impact assessment, no reference to the Jammu and Kashmir Preservation of Specified Trees Act of 1969, which bans mulberry felling entirely, or the Jammu and Kashmir Mulberry Protection Act of 1949.

I calculated what these trees actually produce. 

A single mature mulberry tree generates approximately 3,000 kilograms of oxygen annually while absorbing over 4,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide. The sixty-two trees on........

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