‘Nayak’ and ‘Arjun’ have been hard at work in the bowels of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP). They are not forest officials safeguarding the ecologically sensitive green area spread over 103 square kilometres — among the world’s most unique national parks in a megacity. These are the names of the tunnel boring machines deployed to dig and bore several metres below the park’s surface for two east-west road connectors, the Thane-Borivali Twin Tunnel and the Goregaon-Mulund Link Road.
If the Maharashtra government’s revenue department had its way, then there might have been several Nayaks and Arjuns, besides others, romping around in the remnants of the forest. It received and blindly forwarded a proposal from a BJP worker, RD Jha, who claims to be a former professor of physics and runs an NGO in Mira Road and Darbhanga, Bihar, to set up a university and an integrated township inside the SGNP.
Concerns over protected forest land
The government’s forest department denied permission to the hare-brained idea, citing the Forest (Protection and Conservation) Act, 1980, and the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972. Unless Jha lived under a rock all this while, he would have known that Indian laws do not allow construction inside a national park or sanctuary. This is taught in schools these days.
The question begs itself: why did an average BJP worker, out of the blue, propose a project like this in the national park? An equally serious question: why did the government’s revenue department consider it and forward it for the forest department’s approval? The SGNP faces its most acute, clear and present threat. There are assurances that the forest will not be disturbed by the tunnel boring machines, but what would this digging really mean for the verdant stretches? Would land profiteers not eye the forest above the two twin tunnels as land to be ‘developed’?
These and similar questions emerge not from an ideology that supposedly opposes all ‘development’, as the official narrative goes, lately endorsed by the venerable Supreme Court too, but from a close reading of the pattern of decisions about Mumbai’s natural areas, especially the SGNP. The strategy in writing away vast tracts of Mumbai’s greens and wetlands in the past few years has been rather simple: firmly decide to diminish or erase them, but not all at once, float one project or one phase of a project at a time, and keep at it till the entire natural area has been concretised and ‘developed’.
Pattern of fragmented development
Fragmenting projects, introducing them in piecemeal ways, and seeking permissions, including environmental clearances for each one separately, are all designed to achieve two ends. One, the gigantic scale and cost of the project, usually financed by public funds, do not ring alarm bells among people, leading to uncomfortable questions and pushback. Two, the cumulative environmental impact is not brought to the table or into public discussions; it is presented as limited or minimal for each project or one phase only.
This rather devious strategy is at work on the coastal road too. Budgets and environmental permissions have been obtained in phases, not for the entire stretch. So, the figures floating around are Rs 14,000 crore, Rs 22,000 crore, and so on. If assessed from South Mumbai to Palghar, as the plan goes, the total cost may well be close to Rs 100,000 crore — all public funds — and involve massive changes to Mumbai’s coastal areas, including the mangroves.
The SGNP-Aarey story is following a similar trajectory. Back in 2017, when the work for the Metro 3 car shed began in the Aarey forest, many environmentalists and activists had averred that this would become the gateway to opening up larger areas in Aarey, extending up to or inside the SGNP, to a slew of ‘development’ projects bringing construction, concrete, and crowds into the protected areas. These were not mere apprehensions but projections based on the pattern that the BMC and the state government frequently adopt. They were dismissed and called names.
Threat to Mumbai’s green lung
In barely nine years, the government itself considered a proposal to construct a university and an integrated township inside the protected SGNP. Let’s not forget that the BMC floated and approved the Zonal Master Plan, which opens up the eco-sensitive zones around the SGNP, the mandatory buffer zones laid down in law, to ‘development’, including eco-tourism. On the other side of the SGNP, the Thane Municipal Corporation is busy marking 100 acres, to start with, for proposed public use and infrastructure projects.
Mumbai’s green lung, a protected natural area, is being carved up, one land parcel at a time, and sold to the highest bidders. They will decimate the ancient rich forest and its bewildering biodiversity — depriving Mumbai of the hundreds of square kilometres of canopy that cleans its air and cools the city — and replace them with concrete-glass towers while the authorities construct infrastructure. All in the name of ‘development’.
Well, the lack of east-west connectors has been the bane of commuters in Mumbai going back to the time Bombay was created on the north-south axis. The Thane-Borivali and Goregaon-Mulund stretches have been particularly sore points. The twin tunnel connectors — 11.8 km of Thane-Borivali and 4.7 km of Goregaon-Mulund — at about Rs 19,000 crore and Rs 7,000 crore, respectively, might be more ‘public’ than the coastal road, but we do not know their complete ecological cost. Importantly, there are no guarantees that this intrusion into the SGNP will not bring in more ‘Jhas’ with bizarre construction proposals.
The proposal to change the SGNP name to Atal Bihari Vajpayee Park is a diversionary discussion; the goal is the land in the national park.
Smruti Koppikar, an award-winning senior journalist and urban chronicler, writes extensively on cities, development, gender, and the media. She is the Founder Editor of the award-winning online journal ‘Question of Cities’ and can be reached at smruti@questionofcities.org.
