FPJ Analysis: Conserve On One Hand, Destroy On The Other

This has to be the classic left-hand-right-hand dysfunction. On the one hand, the Maharashtra government took the significant step of declaring the Delhi Public School (DPS) wetland in the satellite township of Navi Mumbai as DPS Flamingo Conservation Reserve. This reflexively brings in the protection that the fragile ecology deserves, not only for the flamingos but also for the area that’s witnessing rapid concretisation. Navi Mumbai was conceptualised and built as a satellite city to Mumbai in the 1960s-70s but there was little said or done to preserve its natural ecology back then or in the decades later.

As the new international airport comes up in the area, the pressure on monetising land to be used for construction has been high. The declaration of the reserve has come about with the dogged persistence of environmental activists and groups that have held the banner aloft in Navi Mumbai for well over a decade now. The 30-acre lake is the first wetland connected to the Thane Creek Flamingo Sanctuary (TCFS) to receive such protection and will go a long way, if implemented with diligence, in preserving the area’s sensitive biodiversity and ecological balance, besides helping with flood control.

However, just a week prior to the declaration, the Maharashtra government and local authorities in Mumbai and Bhayandar, a far suburb, went full throttle against thousands of trees. For the second phase and extension of the Mumbai Coastal Road connecting Versova to Dahisar, the authorities have planned to cut 9,000 mangrove trees and impact another 51,000, a whopping 60,000 under attack. Then, the car depot for the Metro 9 project involves cutting down approximately 10,000 trees in Uttan, Bhayandar. Additionally, the Eastern Freeway improvement project in south Mumbai involves the cutting of 316 trees. Put on a map, that’s a lot of green razed in the city.

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), which is also the city’s Tree Authority and therefore the custodian of its greens, has assured compensation for the loss with mangrove nurseries and compensatory afforestation. However, this is easier said than done. Besides, the survival rate of transplanted trees and afforestation has hardly been encouraging in the last decade. Above all, this smacks of a highly utilitarian and non-sustainable approach to urban development that is gradually being eased out in many international cities. Damaging and destroying natural ecology to accommodate development projects only to attempt to grow back a section of it is old-hat urbanism of the 1970s-80s. Mumbai and Maharashtra governments need to do better and come up with a nature-based plan for urban development.

news