For most of the 20th century, Bengaluru's nickname wasn't "Silicon Valley of India" — it was the Garden City, a place planned around its trees rather than in spite of them. Anyone who has stood in traffic on a treeless arterial road in June knows that nickname doesn't fit anymore.
A city measured tree by tree
Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science have spent years tracking Bengaluru's land cover using satellite imagery going back to the 1970s, and their studies are the closest thing the city has to a long-term paper trail for its greenery. The widely cited headline finding: vegetation cover that stood at well over 60% in the early 1970s has fallen to a small single-digit percentage of the city's area today, even as the built-up area has expanded many times over in the same period.
Where the trees actually went
No single event caused this — it's the accumulation of thousands of individual decisions. Avenue trees came down for road-widening projects meant to ease the very traffic their removal often made worse. Metro construction cleared mature trees along entire corridors, with replanting elsewhere unable to replace decades of canopy in the same season. And as the IT corridor grew, tree-lined compounds and orchards were steadily converted into apartment blocks and office campuses, one plot at a time.
The city feels it before the data does
Long-time residents didn't need a satellite study to notice Bengaluru getting hotter — they noticed it on their electricity bills. A city once known for not needing air conditioning now has one of the fastest-growing AC markets in urban India. Losing tree cover doesn't just remove shade; it removes the city's own natural cooling system, and the effect compounds with every parking lot and road surface that replaces a patch of green.
A tree removed for a road-widening project is gone in an afternoon. A tree planted to replace it needs a decade before it does the same job.
It's not only about aesthetics
Fewer trees means less canopy to intercept monsoon rainfall before it hits already-strained stormwater drains — one more thread connecting Bengaluru's disappearing greenery to the flash flooding that now follows heavy rain in the city. Urban tree cover has also historically supported the biodiversity around Bengaluru's lakes and parks; as one shrinks, pressure builds on the other.
The counter-effort is real, if smaller than the loss
Citizen groups, resident welfare associations, and public-private plantation drives have all pushed back against the trend, and Bengaluru has seen genuinely large-scale planting efforts in recent years — including the Guinness World Records attempt with the Bengaluru Development Authority that TLNB Services LLP served as stewards and consultants for, with 15,00,000 saplings planted across the city and a trained steward network of around 400 people managing the drive. Efforts like this don't undo decades of canopy loss overnight, but they're the only mechanism the city has for putting trees back faster than one plot at a time.
Why this matters to us
We didn't pick the Garden City nickname for this piece by accident — it's the gap between what Bengaluru was built to be and what it's become that motivates work like the GWR saplings initiative in the first place. A city can't plant its way out of decades of tree loss with a single event, but it also can't get its canopy back without ones like it.
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