Volunteer ‘seeders’ sought for Margalla hills

To enhance the green cover in the protected Margalla Hills National Park, the district administration of the federal capital has sought ‘volunteers’ to chuck mud seed balls in the forest during their hikes.

In an appeal, Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT) Administration Deputy Commissioner Hamza Shafqaat recently asked for volunteers who go into the jungles covering the Margalla Hills and throw seeds balls along the different trails to spur the growth of new trees in the national park.

In this regard, Shafqaat said that they had decided to adopt an easy method whereby any visitor heading into the park to help the administration enhance the green cover. He asked visitors to collect a bag of seed balls for free from the counter at the entry point to each trail.

These golf-ball sized seed pallets are packed in mud. People can then just throw them along the trail to spur tree growth.

Talking to the media, DC Shafqaat said that each bag contains around 25 seed balls. Each seed ball contains four seeds for pine.

He added that they have so far, they have thrown around 1.5 million seed balls in the hills, or around six million seeds. For this purpose, he said that volunteers made up to 25 trips a day into the hills for 14 consecutive days.

The volunteers, he said, had covered an area of the park spanning from Daman-e-Koh on one end to Bara Kahu on the other.

“Even if 50 per cent of seeds are successfully planted, around three million trees can be expected to be added to the MHNP,” he remarked, adding that the growth rate of a seed is just 10 per cent which is why, across the world, seed balls are used to raise growth rate to 50 per cent. Shafqaat added that the campaign did not cost the government anything, insisting that it was carried out purely voluntarily with support from a private company.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 9^th, 2020.