BANGALORE: A day after felling 17 trees, the city corporation started the process to occupy land belonging to Stella Maris School to widen Sankey Tank Road.The BBMP on Saturday marked the portion of the land belonging to the school that will be acquired to widen the road. An activist fighting against tree felling pointed out that there are eight trees on the identified land and suspected that they too will be felled. The 54yearold school is in Gayathri Devi Park Extenstion and has many old trees.Besides green cover, the school will lose its assembly hall, recreation area and the platform where students have their lunch. Further, sources from the school said after widening, the 44 classrooms would be close to road and noise from traffic would disrupt the teaching.Deputy Mayor S Harish said he could not comment as the issue was subjudice. About the possibility of procuring land from other side of the road, he said he was not aware of anything. There are suggestions to procure land (it belongs to Sankey Tank) on the other side of the road. The matter is in the court. A clear picture is expected on Monday.Meanwhile, the school's alumni are upset that the school will have to part with that portion of land. Swaroopa Venkatesh, who studied in Stella Maris from LKG to class 10 and is now PR Manager with a private company, said St Mary's statue on the land too would be removed for widening. He reminisced that as students, they used to pray in front of the statue before exams, believing that doing thus would fetch them good marks. He lamented that the students had many memories associated with that tract of land and all that would be gone.Another alumnus Vyjayanthi Iyengar, a techie with a MNC, termed the decision as unfortunate. She said the land was a good lung space and without it the school would be reduced to a concrete jungle.
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