Srinagar: When the stations paint Kashmir in innumerable tones, the chinar burns red in autumn and shines green in spring. But even the giants fall. Over the years, this legally protected tree has been talked, sometimes by the ax of greed, sometimes in the fragile excuse of decomposition.
No more. Now, each chinar has received an identity. Through the “Digital Tree Aadhaar” initiative of the J & K Forest Research Institute (JKFRI), the Chinars have been assigned unique numbers, recorded in the digital world with geographical information systems (SIG) and QR codes to allow monitoring and monitoring in real time.
“It’s like a car plate number,” said Forest Division Officer Syed Tariq Kashani, who carried out the Chinar census over the years. “Through a car number, identify everything about the car and its owner. In the same way, we have done this for the Chinese. “
Metal cards hang from their branches as honor medals, transporting data (location, height, health) recorded in codes, scanned in one touch. His fingerprint ensures that each tree can be tracked, his health examined, his absence explained.
Urbanization, climate change and illegal felling have affected these majestic trees that can grow up to 98 feet high with large arce leaves. With Aadhaar, invasion, illegal felling and negligence can no longer go unnoticed.
Once, the number of Chinars in Kashmira was lost in uncertainty: rumors placed them between 4,000 and 40,000. But when Kashani and his team began their work in 2021, the truth arose from the shadows: 28,560 Chinese trees were counted in Kashmir, although many more remain hidden behind the high fences of the military cliffs, waiting for permission to be registered.
Step by step, year after year, the census grew: 18,000 trees geotogged in 2021-22, another 10,000 in 2023-24. Each tree, measured and registered, was marked by its length, latitude, altitude, health, height and even “diameter at sinus.”
Among them, some are higher than the rest, taking centuries in their rings. The Budgam district has some of the oldest chinars in Asia, its roots deepen the soul of the valley. And in Ganderbal, a new legend has emerged, a tree so vast that eclipses the largest Chinese previously declared in the continent.
“The circumference of this newly recorded tree is 22 m, its height of 27 m,” Kashani said. “The largest record was smaller: 14 m in circumference and 16 m high.” However, even this giant is inclined to an older one: the largest Chinese in the world, which is found in the Georgia in Europe, 27 m in circumference and 30 m high.
The chinar, or “Bouin”, as it is called in Kashmir, has been here long before the Mogoles emperors, although the story accredits Akbar with planting an estimate of 1,200 Chinars in Naseem Bagh near Lake Dal in Srinagar. Even today, that legacy survives: Chinars rows still standing.
Bijbehara, the “city of Chinars”, is still a living monument to these giants. Here, the trees gather as wise in the silent communion, their twisted branches that extend towards the sky, their awnings throw older shadows than the streets of the city that overlook.
But the story alone cannot protect the Chinese. The Aadhaar Digital says that these trees are no longer only silent sentinels, but that they monitored beings.
