NR&W 7

Started pretty late on the earth day story. The theme is related to trees and there are old news stories on how Pakistan has an alarmingly high rate of deforestation. The problem was that the facts were pretty old, I had to spend hours looking for recent studies but could not find any. The last local report was published in 2004, an international report in 2011. Then the government officials would not give me their comments, The IG forests told me he would get back to me via email, even though I explained that earth day was hours away. The minister’s office said flatly that they had no plans of issuing a theme related statement. Then one of the guys from the forest department picked up and I got enough material for the story. Filed it just in Time.