Mumbai will have a new climate risk assessment study, and the report will be unveiled next year, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) told us a few days ago. It is necessary to get this assessment given the significant changes and massive transformation along Mumbai’s coastline over the past five years, an official told the media. We should have nodded in approval and felt reassured that the city is in the hands of a civic authority that understands climate risks, is a step ahead of what’s coming, and charts the future course of development accordingly.
Instead, most Mumbaikars who took in the news met it with indifference or cynicism; hardly anyone felt reassured. This says a lot about the trust and confidence that the civic body, Asia’s largest with its last annual budget running into nearly Rs 81,000 crore, inspires. The indifference stems from the gap between what the BMC says and does. The cynicism comes from knowing that the gap means doom for the future of Mumbai and watching the BMC drive that engine of doom.
BMC’s Climate Risk Record
Nothing exemplifies this more than the way it has handled the city’s climate risks. The BMC has known these risks for decades; it identified hazard areas back in 2018, and its former commissioner, IS Chahal, elaborated in 2021 on the areas in South Mumbai that might be submerged by the rising sea levels. Even as it conducted, or had access to, studies of the climate risks, it happily issued ecologically unsound and climate-hazardous permissions for redevelopment or new development because commerce and profit must prevail over all else. Take three examples.
Through the 2000s, it allowed 630 acres of marshy low-lying land, wetlands, and mangroves along the Mahim Creek and sections of the Mithi River to be landfilled—reclaimed is the official word—by the MMRDA to build the Bandra Kurla Complex that has since been turned into an uber-posh commercial and residential enclave. Could it have intervened, knowing how critical the wetlands and mangroves were to keep Mumbai from flooding disasters? It should have. If MMRDA was the more powerful agency not answerable to Mumbai, overriding the BMC, then it raises even more difficult questions of where the buck really stops.
Warnings Over Coastal Projects
In 2019, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report flagged two things: one, that the global emissions leading to sea level rise “severely threatened” coastal cities of Mumbai, among others, and added the alarming notice that parts of the city could be submerged by 2100; two, its report called the BMC’s coastal road “maladaptive” infrastructure because large-scale land ‘reclamation’ and sealing off of inter-tidal zones could worsen floods and prove to be a long-term climate risk. The BMC went ahead anyway and continues to this day.
In 2021, the then municipal commissioner, IS Chahal, noted that climate change events had “come to our doorstep,” and, by 2050, 80 per cent of Nariman Point and Mantralaya, and about 70 per cent of the city’s A, B, C, and D wards, covering major parts of South Mumbai, could be submerged due to a rise in sea level. He spoke at the unveiling of the Mumbai Climate Action Plan. The plan, however, minimised the hazards of the rise, citing the lack of reliable coastal data.
Between 2016 and 2021, the city lost more than 5,000 acres of green cover, raising heat levels, and witnessed repeated incidences of severe flooding every monsoon. Meanwhile, the coastal road construction went ahead in full swing, during which the BMC created (reclaimed) 247 acres of land, altering the coast. Last year, the BMC sought—and got—permission from the Bombay High Court to fell over 45,600 mangroves for the Versova-Bhayander extension of the coastal road (another 5,000-plus mangroves are slated to be sacrificed for the Virar-Palghar section, but that’s not in the BMC’s jurisdiction).
New Assessment Raises Questions
How strange or facetious indeed that the BMC has presided over, or itself initiated, projects that led to “significant changes” and “massive transformation” of Mumbai’s coast over the years but will now start a study to assess their risks. This study is supposed to identify the areas that are at risk from climactic events, especially sea level rise, and assess how changes in land use, coastal development, and climate patterns have changed the city’s vulnerability. A bit too late?
It cannot be that the BMC was unaware of the full extent of the impact of the projects through the past decade. It is possible that it did not reveal this to us Mumbaikars. So, why now? A possible explanation is that there has been new chatter and concern around the UN Report on coastal cities, including Mumbai, being at risk by rising sea levels and increases in sea surface temperatures, and that erratic, heavy rainfall and high tidal waves pose “immediate risk” to the city.
Call For A Pause
Ideally, given all that it knows already and awaiting the results of the new assessment it has undertaken along the 149-kilometre coastline, the BMC should have called an immediate halt to all the mega projects that have or will alter the coastline and coastal areas. It is the only sane and logical step to take. Pause, assess, and course-correct so that the projects do not take Mumbai closer to doom. The BMC is in the driver’s seat, or so we believe.
But it will be surprising if the BMC takes this pause-assess-proceed route because commercial pressures, or rather political-commercial pressures, will not allow it to. So, it will continue playing the classic Jekyll and Hyde game—allowing development and business as usual to flourish at an ecological cost that it is yet to fully assess, while pretending to be deeply concerned about the climate risks of the development it has sanctioned. In the gap, at stake, are the lives and livelihoods of millions of Mumbaikars, that’s all!
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.
