Aam Aadmi Party staged a strong protest in front of Ladhowal Seed Farm against the auction of more than twelve thousand trees of different species including fruit spread in 35 Acres of land by PAU authorities at its Ladhowal Seed Farm here today. The volunteers lead by Ludhiana Zone Coordinator Col. C M Lakhanpal and Fatehgarh Sahib Zone Coordinator Varinder Khara holding placards with slogans to save environment and plant more trees etc. demonstrated and demanded to stop the auction immediately.Latter interacting with the media, Col Lakhanpal said that the PAU authorities were supposed to create and protect the green cover to improve the environment, but the PAU authorities themselves were engaged in demolishing the already grown up trees. He said that the trees being auctioned included 10583 pre-matured Poplars, 1180 Guava, 307 Mango and 100 trees of Citrus and the authorities had given a time of 30 days to vacate the land and lift the material.
The fruit trees under auction were in very a good condition and fetching income of more than 25 lakh per year and many families were earning their livelihood from fruit Gardens, Col Lakhanpal added. It is pertinent to mention here that earlier the Govt. had leased out a big chunk of land out of this Seed Farm to a private influential company at a nominal price for 99 years. He suspected that this land could also be disposed off to some politically linked Industrialists. He further added that Ludhiana city was already known as one of most polluted cities of the country, where the people were suffering from fatal diseases and maximum plants were required to be planted to improve the environment. He demanded that the auction must be stopped immediately and warned that if the PAU authorities continued with its plans to demolish the green cover, the party would further strengthen its protests and may go for a PIL.Prominent among others who participated in the protest included Labour Wing Zone Coordinator Rajinderpal Kaur and Labour Wing Circle Coordinator Bal Kishan Pappy, Pankaj Saxena, Subhas Chander, Social Media Coordinator Puneet Sahni, Charanjit Kaur, Varinder Jassian of Kisan Wing, Jagdish Saini,Pawan Kumar, Harjit Singh and Hawa Singh .