📰 NGOs on ED watchlist for funding Naxals
Agency preparing list of organisations
•Expanding its investigations from the Bihar-Jharkhand region to Chhattisgarh, the Enforcement Directorate has zeroed in on some non-government organisations (NGOs) that are suspected to have funded Naxal operatives in the State.
•The agency is preparing a list of such NGOs to examine their financial dealings, as they are already on the radar of security and police agencies. The action is being taken following several rounds of multi-agency meetings on devising a coordinated strategy to choke funding to Naxal operatives in various States.
•Top police officers of Odisha, Telangana, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal, besides senior functionaries of the ED, National Investigation Agency and the Intelligence Bureau, had held a meeting with the Union Home Secretary last month.
•The ED has also identified some prominent industrial houses that paid ‘protection’ money to the banned outfit. It is learnt that their functionaries will soon be summoned for recording their statements.
•The Directorate had earlier given a presentation on its findings based on the action taken so far against several Naxal leaders operating in Bihar and Jharkhand. The agency has found that they extorted money and laundered the funds, acquiring movable and immovable assets.
•Properties worth crores have been attached under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act over the past few months.
•In one case, the ED attached the assets in connection with 67 FIRs and charge sheets filed against fugitive Naxal operative Pradyumn Sharma, who along with his associates allegedly extorted money from businessmen through certain private contractors. The accused had also acquired land and other properties in different parts of Bihar.
📰 Chronicle of a victory foretold
Turkish republicanism is posing an incoherent challenge to Erdoğan’s mix of nationalism and Sunni internationalism.
•On Sunday, June 24, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) won both the presidential and the parliamentary elections. The elections were conducted in extraordinary circumstances. Hundreds of journalists are in prison, as are thousands of political opponents — including the leader of one of the main Opposition parties, Selahattin Demirtaş. The state-run media did not care to be neutral. Most state institutions, including the electoral commission, put themselves forward as the champions for Mr. Erdoğan’s re-election. But while Mr. Erdoğan and the AKP certainly won the vote — including the presidential election by the first round — he will have a hard time winning legitimacy for this victory.
•The state-run news outlet, Anadolu Agency, first announced that Mr. Erdoğan had won 70% of the votes in the presidential contest. Then, they adjusted the percentage downwards to 59% and eventually to 52%. The initial number was crucial. It created the sense of overwhelming triumph for Mr. Erdoğan. His margin of victory was slim, and even slimmer if we acknowledge that 11% of his party alliance’s overall support of 53% in the Parliament came from the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). Without the MHP behind him in the presidential contest, Mr. Erdoğan may have been forced into a run-off against the standard bearer of the old national guard, Muharrem İnce of the Republican People’s Party (CHP).
•But the fact of the matter is that in the end Mr. Erdoğan took more than half the vote. He was able to win votes in both his rural strongholds and in the urban areas. The way he positions himself is crucial — as a Turkish nationalist, including a protector of Turkish business interests, and as a Sunni internationalist. He remains able to mop up the votes of the Anatolian business communities of different sizes and of the pious electorate. It helped that he was in alliance with the MHP, the near-fascist bloc although it is startling to realise that in this election the Turkish people supported another right-wing party, the İYİ or Good Party. The Good Party is led by Meral Akşener, a former Minister of the Interior with a controversial background in the deep state. It was even more remarkably in alliance with the CHP.
•None of this mattered to Mr. Erdoğan’s steamroller effect. He swept up his core votes and managed to go past the margin with the help of his own tethered far right-wing allies.
Before the crisis hits
•Mr. Erdoğan had called for elections a year before they were due. This was a clever political move. Undercurrents suggest that the Turkish economy will implode before the year is over. It would have been perilous for him to go to the people in the midst of a full-blown crisis. Careful monetary policy has put off the crisis. It is what gave him the opportunity to establish his political authority before he tackles the economic weakness of Turkey.
•In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, new money was created to break the unavailability of credit. Turkey, like other middle-income countries (Argentina and Mexico), joined the larger economies in a low-interest regime to stimulate economic growth. When the U.S. Federal Reserve began to reduce money supply and to raise interest rates, capital withdrew from places such as Turkey and Mexico, which made their currencies lose value.
•Mr. Erdoğan’s financial managers prevented the Turkish central bank from raising interest rates to deal with this capital outflow. The Turkish lira dropped in value against the U.S. dollar from 3.75TL in early 2018 to 4.92TL by May. What this policy suggests is not that Mr. Erdoğan wished to stem the capital flight but that he wanted to protect his allies amongst the mid-level Anatolian business communities and the small artisans. They would have been wiped out without this assistance. Twice the central bank rushed in to support these sections of the population, and yet the bank remains under pressure to do more to prevent the lira’s free fall.
•These new manoeuvres of international finance capital added substantial fragility to Turkey’s economy, which already accumulated substantial external debt of around $500 billion (mostly private sector debt). By the end of the year, Turkey will have to pay down almost half of this debt. To do so, Mr. Erdoğan may be compelled to enact policies that favour the business communities and disadvantage the working class and the peasantry. Higher rates of unemployment can be expected, as can inflation in essential goods.
•Mr. Erdoğan will likely deal with this situation in the way he has tackled it in the past — by finding scapegoats in Turkey’s Kurdish population or in unnamed ‘outsiders’. He effectively uses a seam of Turkish anxiety about being targeted by outsiders, a symptom of having not properly come to terms with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and of the European Union’s (EU’s) awkward arm’s-length relationship with Turkey.
Opposition’s agenda?
•In his press conference on Monday, Mr. İnce implied that his party had failed in its mission. Turkish republicanism poses an incoherent challenge to Mr. Erdoğan’s combination of Turkish nationalism and Sunni internationalism. It is wedded to the EU project, including Turkish membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and is unable to grasp the concerns and expectations of the pious sections of the lower middle class and the working class. Without a clear economic policy that would capture the imagination of the people, the CHP and its allies simply appear as an anti-Erdoğan force, one that makes his personality the core around which it has constructed its opposition. What the CHP stands against — Mr. Erdoğan — is clear. What the CHP stands for, however, is unclear.
•The People’s Democratic Party (HDP), a combination of the mainstream left and Kurdish nationalist groups, went into the election at the greatest disadvantage. Its standard bearer, Mr. Demirtaş, had to run from prison. In his press conference, Mr. İnce said that he had hoped for a better result from the İYİ Party and the HDP. But, in fact, the HDP crossed the 10% threshold in the parliamentary elections and will once more have its parliamentarians seated. The HDP’s gains, however, came largely from western Turkey, where the Kurdish population voted to ensure that it would get it parliament. Faith that it can move an agenda against Mr. Erdoğan and the AKP is not high.
Between two worlds
•At the start of the Arab Spring in 2011, Mr. Erdoğan was confident that Turkey would re-emerge as a major player in the region. A foreign policy outlook named neo-Ottomanism commanded Turkey’s ambitions. A failed attempt to overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and the defeat of Turkey’s preferred Muslim Brotherhood from Tunisia to Egypt led to the desiccation of Mr. Erdoğan’s hopes for the expansion of Turkish influence. Tension with the West and the failure in the Arab world have driven Turkey back towards relations with Russia, China and Iran.
•Mr. Erdoğan’s re-election will mean only that Turkey will continue to stumble between its obligations to NATO and the West as well as its need for close links to Russia, China and Iran. Long known as the hinge between Asia and Europe, Turkey is now more than ever caught in that position. Mr. Erdoğan will not be able to move an agenda out of this trap. He, like Turkey, is caught between two worlds, unable to choose, riding a tiger that he will not be able to control.
•E. Ahmet Tonak and Vijay Prashad work at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Tonak, an economist, recently contributed to ‘Authoritarianism and Resistance in Turkey’. Prashad, Chief Editor of LeftWord Books, most recently edited ‘Strongmen: Putin-Trump-Modi-Erdogan-Duterte’
📰 Russian sanctions to dominate 2+2 talks
India is likely to firmly place its objections to CAATSA
•When India and U.S. hold their first 2+2 Dialogue involving the External Affairs and Defence Ministers and their counterparts, one of the key issues would be questions regarding the recent Russia-related sanctions that have now come up as a key impediment for India’s defence modernisation.
•“It is already the elephant in the room. At the dialogue it can be expected to take up a good amount of time,” a senior military source said.
•External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will visit the U.S. for the first meeting of the 2+2 Dialogue on July 6 with Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo and Secretary of Defence James N. Mattis. The new dialogue format was agreed upon by the two sides during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Washington D.C. in June 2017.
•A MEA statement last week said the two sides will “share perspectives on strengthening their strategic and security ties and exchange views on a range of bilateral, regional and global issues of mutual interest.”
•The impact of CAATSA (Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act) is still being assessed in the military circles even as policy moves from the U.S. have not been reassuring, say officials.
•Last week, the U.S. Senate passed the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA) for 2019 without any waiver provisions under CAATSA for countries having significant defence relations with Russia.
No waivers
•The House version which was passed earlier had allowed limited waiver, which did not find place in the Senate version.
•The House version allows for waivers for 180 days, provided the administration certifies that the country in question is scaling back its ties with Russia. Even this would be tough for India, as it would be extremely difficult to scale down its relations with Russia, sources point out.
•According to indications, the Indian side will firmly place its objections to CAATSA during the 2+2 Dialogue as practically all major defence deals in the pipeline between India and the U.S. would be held up due to this.
•Earlier this month, Ms. Sitharaman had said, “We have clearly explained how India and Russia’s defence cooperation has been going on for a long time and that it is a time-tested relationship. We have mentioned that CAATSA cannot impact the India-Russia defence cooperation.”
•Congressman Mac Thornberry, Chairman of the U.S. House Armed Forces Committee, last month said in New Delhi that there was an understanding in the U.S. Administration and the Congress on the need for “some additional flexibility” in the law and hoped that it would be granted in the Act to benefit friends and partners like India and others who have significant relations with Russia.
📰 ‘China proposed 2+1 format for India talks’
Idea was broached during Oli’s visit
•The spirit of the Wuhan informal summit echoed strongly last week during the visit of Nepal Prime Minister K.P. Oli to Beijing, with China proposing a new dialogue mechanism that would also involve India.
•An official source told The Hindu that the Chinese side proposed to Mr. Oli a “two plus one” format for dialogue. “This is different from a trilateral mechanism. Under the Chinese proposal, China and India can jointly conduct a dialogue with a third regional country,” the source said.
•The Chinese initiative is not Nepal-specific. “My impression is that the two-plus one formulation is flexible and can be applied to any other country in South Asia,” the source said.
Meet with Xi
•During Mr. Oli’s visit, the Chinese side made its intent clear to engage deeply with Nepal, and develop special ties with its Himalayan neighbour. The hosts broke protocol by initiating Mr. Oli’s meeting with President Xi Jinping, ahead of the customary delegation level talks with Prime Minister Li Keqiang.
•Yet, Beijing also made it plain that China-Nepal ties would be docked with India’s shared interests as well. The Chinese leadership, in fact, made direct reference to the April Wuhan informal summit, which has begun to have a cascading impact on the region. “The Chinese made it clear that they were not interested in pursuing a zero-sum approach with Nepal. In fact, the hosts spoke about the Wuhan informal summit between President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, including the discussion between the two leaders on achieving greater regional cooperation, which covered connectivity,” the source said.
•During Mr. Oli’s visit, it had become evident that China was inclined to fulfill its ambitious agenda with Nepal gradually, after ensuring that such steps were in sync with India’s interests.
•Analysts say, that the Nepali side has understood the “big picture”, appreciating that China is keen to build bridges with India, as Beijing’s friction with the U.S. under the Trump administration begins to mount.
•“Besides, bringing India on board is essential for enhanced regional connectivity, including a trans-Himalayan corridor through Nepal, if President Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative is to achieve its full potential,” the source observed.
📰 Elephantine threat: Assam considering sedation, relocation of aggressive animals
Experimentto bring downman-elephant conflicts in State
•Two herds of aggressive elephants and a lone rogue may be sedated for a sobering effect and relocated.
•Assam wildlife officials are keen on replicating their Uttarakhand counterparts’ jumbo-relocation experiment for reducing man-elephant conflicts in western Assam. But the job is easier said than done, as other elephant habitats and corridors in Assam are under stress.
•About half of 58 elephant corridors in the northeast, comprising 35% of the country’s, are in Assam. More than 15 of these corridors, used by an estimated 9,350 elephants, are under the Northeast Frontier Railway.
‘Stadium without exit’
•Human habitations and barriers such as electric fences and trenches have blocked some of these corridors that once enabled movement of the two herds comprising 40-50 elephants between Assam’s Goalpara district and Garo Hills of Meghalaya. With nowhere to go, the elephants have virtually been confined within a small area that forest officials likened to a stadium without any exit.
•“The elephants have become like football, kicked around from one part of the stadium to the other. The fact that scores of reserve forests and proposed reserve forests in the district are fragmented and interspersed with villages and illegal fishermen controlling a 50 sq km wetland called Urpad Beel, which the elephants used to wallow in, have complicated matters,” Dev Prakash Bankhwal, Principal Chief Conservator of Forest (Wildlife), told The Hindu on Tuesday.
17 people killed
•Goalpara has 103 reserve forests, covering 20% of the district’s landmass. Most of the elephants have been forced to move about in a 300 sq km area for more than two years now.
•Cornered, the herds and a lone makhna – male without tusks – have turned aggressive, raiding villages and killing at least 17 people this year.
•More worrying for wildlife officials and activists is the fact that conflicts are happening throughout the year, instead of winter months as in the past.
•The gravity of the problem in Goalpara made the State forest department call all wildlife officials and veterinarians for a meeting on Monday to work out strategies.
•“The Brahmaputra Valley is very narrow and does not have space for so many elephants and humans to coexist without conflicts. This is an intractable problem since elephants find their movement blocked almost everywhere,” Mr. Bankhwal said.
•One of the strategies discussed was translocation of the rogue loner and other ‘troublemakers’ in the herds. Officials said they have been encouraged by a similar experiment near Rajaji National Park in Uttarakhand.
•An aggressive male near Rajaji was sedated and relocated 40 km away across a river. It eventually returned to its old haunts but was “sobered” by the displacement, officials said.
•“That elephant has become less aggressive, maybe because of some kind of fright that it might be captured again and sent elsewhere. We are thinking on those lines, but the biggest challenge is finding suitable locations for translocation,” Mr. Bankhwal said.
📰 Transplanting best practices
Public hospitals must be brought into the loop for deceased donor programmes
•Heart transplantation has always been in the public eye right from the time Christiaan Barnard performed the first successful human heart transplant in 1967, in Cape Town, Africa. Therefore, controversy in India over a large percentage of foreign nationals receiving cardiac transplants from deceased donors in India is not surprising. This follows a report published by The Hindu (June 12, 2018) based on a leaked WhatsApp message from the head of the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation. However, the debate around it is vital because it is a marker of the fault lines in transplantation policy in India that need immediate correction.
•The senior surgeon, Mohamed Rela, wrote an article last week on the need for transparency in the organ allocation process (The Hindu, Editorial page, “Heart of the matter”, June 19). He is right in saying that Tamil Nadu’s deceased donor programme is one of the best in the country and that public credibility is key to its continuing success. But it is also important to address certain key drivers behind foreigners getting cardiac transplants.
•It may be pertinent to note that one of the first cardiac transplants in the world was attempted back in 1968 at Mumbai’s King Edward Memorial Hospital by P.K. Sen (the world’s fifth and sixth heart transplants). What is relevant to the debate is that Dr. Sen’s transplants as well as India’s first successful cardiac transplant in 1994 (by P. Venugopal at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi) were performed in public institutions.
Market pressures
•Along the way, organ transplantation in India (this includes Tamil Nadu) largely became a private sector activity. Hence while the act of donation is a public act and the organs a public good, from that point onwards whatever happens is largely under the private sector. The rules of market medicine thus dictate who the organs go to. And hospitals that invest large sums in transplantation programmes which include huge payouts to surgeons look for returns.
•Unlike the liver and kidneys, a heart transplant cannot be performed with a living donor. Incidentally, around 20% of living donor liver transplants performed in some of the large centres in India are also on foreigners. So patients with advanced heart failure from certain countries which do not have a deceased donor programme have no option but to try their luck in India. As these are largely performed in corporate hospitals, the costs in India are well beyond a large majority of the local population. This is where foreigner nationals who are often able to pay such sums fit in.
•Cardiovascular practice in India is largely dominated by bypass and stenting for ischemic heart disease partly because this is a cash cow. Treatment of ailments such as valve problems and advanced cardiac failure has been sidelined. For example, in Mumbai city while there are at least 30 cardiac centres with advanced expertise, only one hospital has chosen to start and support cardiac transplantation. As one who has been associated closely with deceased donation in Mumbai (especially the first few years) I often saw perfect hearts of young deceased donors remaining unutilised for the lack of recipients. Cardiac surgeons with training in transplantation who were appointed for this purpose did not have enough referrals and chose to leave or focus their attention on bypass. As has been pointed out, this may change in the future.
Revisit policy
•While ensuring the credibility of the process in the public eye lies at the heart of deceased organ donation, we need to go beyond just general calls for transparency. We will have to demonstrate that organs will go to those who need them the most rather than to those who can pay for them. This will mean considering hard policy changes that include strengthening the capacity of the public sector, subsidising transplantation and perhaps enabling affirmative action in the allocation process in favour of public hospitals. Thus every fifth or sixth organ could be mandatorily allotted to a public hospital or the private centre can be asked to perform a certain proportion of transplants free.
•As Tamil Nadu has led the way in deceased donation and also has a good record of public medicine, it could lead the way here. One of the secrets behind Europe’s high donation rates is public trust in their respective nationalised health schemes.
•While India has enthusiastically embraced the idea of a liberalised economy and immediately applied it to health care, many countries have insulated their health-care systems from the ravages of the market. This too is at the heart of this matter.
📰 Tainted by uranium: On groundwater contamination
The groundwater contamination across India must be probed, and safe sources identified
•Reports of widespread uranium contamination in groundwater across India demand an urgent response. A study, published in Environmental Science and Technology Letters, has found over 30 micrograms per litre (mcg/l) of the heavy metal in parts of northwestern, southern and southeastern India. Drinking such water can damage one’s kidneys, and the World Health Organization prescribes 30 mcg/l as an upper limit. Unfortunately, the residents of the regions surveyed were using the contaminated wells as their main source of drinking water. These findings highlight a major gap in India’s water-quality monitoring. As the Bureau of Indian Standards does not specify a norm for uranium level, water is not tested regularly for it. This is despite the fact that evidence of uranium contamination has accumulated from across India over the last decade. A 2015 Bangalore study, for example, found uranium levels of over 2000 mcg/l in the southern part of the city. Other studies found levels of over 500 mcg/l in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. The Environmental Science paper adds new data to this body of evidence by sampling wells in Rajasthan and Gujarat.
•The health effects of drinking uranium-tainted water merit special attention. A few small animal and human studies have found that the heavy metal damages the kidneys. The studies indicate that this is a chemical effect, rather than a radiological one, even though uranium is radioactive. But the chronic effects of uranium consumption are still unknown. Could there be, for example, a link between the high rates of chronic kidney disease (CKD) in India and uranium exposure? In a survey conducted between 2005 and 2010, an Indian registry found 8,385 CKD cases with no known cause. One cluster of mystery disease, located in Srikakulam district in Andhra Pradesh, has stumped epidemiologists for years. It is impossible to say if these clusters have anything to do with groundwater contamination, unless researchers look at it systematically. Another critical area of research is the mechanism by which uranium enters groundwater. The Environmental Science paper identified two types of terrains with heavy contamination. In Rajasthan and other northwestern regions, uranium occurs mostly in alluvial aquifers; while in southern regions such as Telangana, crystalline rocks such as granite seem to be the source. When groundwater is over-extracted from such soils, the researchers suggest, the uranium is exposed to air, triggering its release. These hypotheses must be explored, because they will help determine where to find safer water. This is what happened in West Bengal, where a decade of research revealed why the contaminant arsenic mainly occurred in shallow aquifers. Researchers found that a combination of geological and chemical triggers brought arsenic to the Ganga delta in the Holocene era, and then released it into the sediments from that period. Similar research across India’s uranium hotspots can uncover who is at risk, and how to protect them.
📰 Saving Delhi’s trees
The government could heed residents’ voices on redesigning the city
•Over the last few days, Delhi residents have been protesting against the government’s approval for felling over 14,000 trees in south Delhi. Faced with severe criticism, the National Buildings Construction Corporation, tasked with redeveloping half a dozen south Delhi colonies, on Monday assured the Delhi High Court that no trees would be cut for the project till July 4, which is temporary relief. Many of the trees proposed to be felled are mature, local, fruit-bearing ones that provide clean air, shade and water recharge to humans and are homes to many birds. These areas of Delhi have served as the “lungs” of the city. However, the project reports overlook these qualities.
•The projects, involving huge investments and wealthy, influential contractors, were designed by the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs and approved by the Union Cabinet in 2017. They have been declared “smart” and “green” despite their ecological impacts such as high water usage and tree loss. Following the orders of the National Green Tribunal in September 2017 in a case challenging these projects, at least five of the seven projects received environment clearances between November and June.
•Large constructions have been difficult to manage in India. The sector has systematically lobbied to be excluded from the environmental norms of the country and has been successful in carving out special privileges for itself in the environment clearance process. From 2006, most construction projects have been approved based on an application form instead of detailed assessment reports. In 2014, schools, colleges and hostels for educational institutions were exempted from taking environment clearances as long as they followed specific sustainability parameters. In 2016, projects with areas of less than 20,000 sq m were permitted to proceed as long as they submitted a self-declaration ensuring adherence to environmental norms. As a result of these privileges, construction projects contribute significantly to urban air and noise pollution and high water consumption in cities. Compensatory afforestation taken up in lieu of trees felled by projects is a failure due to poor survival rates of saplings and no monitoring. Yet all regulatory bodies treat large constructions with kid gloves.
•The Minister for Urban Development has stated that this public campaign is “misinformed”. But that is far from the truth. In a literate, urban society that has high access to the Internet, the lack of official information on urban development and its impacts can only be understood as an indirect form of public silencing. There are no public hearings held for urban construction projects, and governments assume that citizens have nothing to say about them. Since Delhi is ruled by so many agencies, you can run from pillar to post and still not have a clue about who is in charge of what. The residents are now appealing to the government to embrace inclusive ways of redesigning the city. The governments could join hands by committing to review these projects.
📰 Pakistan’s arid land transforms into green gold
The ‘Billion Tree Tsunami’ has seen 300 million trees of 42 species planted across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
•Around the region of Heroshah, previously arid hills are now covered with forest as far as the horizon. In northwestern Pakistan, hundreds of millions of trees have been planted to fight deforestation.
•In 2015 and 2016, some 16,000 labourers planted more than 9,00,000 fast-growing eucalyptus trees at regular, geometric intervals in Heroshah — and the titanic task is just a fraction of the effort across the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Control against erosion
•“Before it was completely burnt land. Now they have green gold in their hands,” commented forest manager Pervaiz Manan as he displayed pictures of the site previously, when only sparse blades of tall grass interrupted the monotonous landscape.
•The new trees will reinvigorate the area’s scenic beauty, act as a control against erosion, help mitigate climate change, decrease the chances of floods and increase the chances of precipitation, says Mr. Manan, who oversaw the re-vegetation of Heroshah.
•Residents also see them as an economic boost — which, officials hope, will deter them from cutting the new growth down to use as firewood in a region where electricity can be sparse.
•Further north, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Swat, many of the high valleys were denuded by the Pakistan Taliban during their reign from 2006 to 2009.
•Now they are covered in pine saplings. “You can’t walk without stepping on a seedling,” smiles Yusufa Khan, another forest department worker.
•The Heroshah and Swat plantations are part of the “Billion Tree Tsunami”, a provincial government programme that has seen a total of 300 million trees of 42 different species planted across the province.
•A further 150 million plants were given to landowners, while strict forest regeneration measures have allowed the regrowth of 730 million trees — roughly 1.2 billion new trees in total, says the programme’s management.
Ambitious goal
•Kamran Hussain, a manager of the Pakistani branch of the World Wildlife Fund, who conducted an independent audit of the project, says their figures showed slightly less — but still above target at 1.06 billion trees.
•The Billion Tree Tsunami, which cost the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government $169 million, started in November 2014. Officials say they are still implementing maintenance safeguards such as fire protection, with the project due to be completed in June 2020.
