Like Mumbai's Development Plan, chart an Ecological Plan urgently

Like Mumbai's Development Plan, chart an Ecological Plan urgently

It should be clear to one and all now that Mumbai’s economy and liveability, including people’s health and mortality, is directly and powerfully tied to the city’s ecological health

Smruti KoppikarUpdated: Thursday, February 16, 2023, 09:36 PM IST
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File pic of one of Mumbai's bad air days | Salman Ansari

The month of February must rank as a turning point in the life and rhythm of Mumbai – if those at the helm of its affairs paid greater and genuine attention. The megapolis by the sea, built over centuries by landfilling and decimating its natural areas, was the world’s second-most air polluted city in the world in the first week of the month, and it recorded a high 37.3 degrees Celsius earlier this week which was at least six degrees above normal for February.

Mumbaikars can commiserate with one another, sign online petitions, and hope that life does not become too unbearable. The Maharashtra government, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), and the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA), to name the three of the dozens of authorities in charge, appear to be the proverbial ostriches in the sand given their attitude to the city’s ecological and climatic health. The BMC, laughably, has undertaken — with heavy advertising — 500 “beautification projects” as a feel-good palliative for Mumbaikars. A beautiful Mumbai, whatever that means in the official perspective, is welcome but we desperately need a cleaner and healthier Mumbai.

If there is recognition that it can no longer be business-as-usual in the city, then among the first steps to take would be for the authorities to chart out a comprehensive and participatory Ecological Plan for the city, and go forward for the entire Mumbai Metropolitan Region too. This Ecological Plan, let’s call it EP, must be detailed and inviolable, and honestly lay out all the ecological issues that the city faces, how they will be addressed in the short-term of say five years and long-term of 20 years. If such an EP is prepared, it will be possible to allocate responsibilities to different departments and demand accountability.

Mumbai has had a Development Plan (DP) for decades; the latest iteration of this land use and allotment plan is supposed to last us till at least 2034. However, the DP 2034 or any other vision document and plan will become meaningless if they cannot be placed within the larger Ecological Plan. And no, the Mumbai Climate Action Plan is not a comprehensive and holistic ecological plan; it can be made part of the Ecological Plan when — or if — this is charted out.

It should be clear to one and all now that Mumbai’s economy and liveability, including people’s health and mortality, is directly and powerfully tied to the city’s ecological health — the state of its rivers and waterways, green spaces and open spaces, tree cover, mangroves, salt pan lands, and every sliver of its natural areas. If Mumbai’s ecology is compromised, people’s health will also take a hit as is happening now with a large uptick in respiratory ailments and its economy will eventually flounder too. That this needs to be spelt out in 2023, decades after the false binary of environment and economy was put to rest, is appalling – even scandalous.

However, the authorities seem to not have learned the lessons they should have. In the first meeting of the Maharashtra Economic Advisory Council this week, the government and members of the EAC — as always, a preponderance of industry leaders with a smattering of academics — listened to the deputy chief minister Devendra Fadnavis projecting the state’s march towards “becoming a trillion dollar economy with inclusive growth”. But there was hardly any mention of the prevailing ecological health of Mumbai-MMR which are responsible for more than 30-35% of the state’s economy. The Gross Domestic Product of the region is currently at about $140 billion, according to the MMRDA which is preparing a project proposal to boost the economy in the region outside Mumbai city.

For those who have watched this trajectory closely for more than 20-25 years, there is an inescapable sense of déjà vu. Back in 2003, the private sector and industry lobby group Bombay First, now Mumbai First, had partnered with the international consulting firm McKinsey and Company to produce the “Vision Mumbai” report on how to boost the city’s economy and make its governance more corporate-like. Other than stray mentions of the need to conserve “environment” in a couple of lines, almost as an afterthought, the report did not even acknowledge the ecological-economy connection which was by then accepted around the world.

That the newly-constituted Economic Advisory Council repeats this template 20 years later, especially in the light of mounting evidence of grave ecological problems in Mumbai-MMR is unpardonable. It is telling that a council such as this one did not make place for ecologists-environmentalists at the table – besides environmentalists, it should have included urban planners, sociologists and social science researchers, health professionals, gender and other marginalised groups too — and shows how economic development is still discussed in an isolated rather than a holistic manner.

It is staggering — and sobering — to take stock of what Mumbai has in lost ecological terms merely because it was not considered significant to be factored into development. Researchers, using remote sensing data, had informed us in 2014 that the share of vegetation (forests, agricultural land, green spaces and so on) in the city’s landscape had declined to barely 30% – about 63% fall – in the nearly 40-year period from 1973 to 2009. That's the ecological price the city has paid for its "development".

The researchers classified the landscape into four categories – urban to mean residential and industrial built complexes as well as paved surfaces such as roads, vegetation, water bodies such as rivers and lakes, and others including rocks or quarry pits. In the same period, Mumbai saw an increase of 155% in land used — opened up or landfilled — for urban purposes, showed the report; essentially, vegetation or green cover was lost to constructed structures such as buildings and roads. Another piece of research, by Aithal et all, in 2017, showed that Mumbai had lost 65% of its water bodies to such “development”.

The construction and real estate industry may be among the key drivers of Mumbai’s economy but it is equally among the biggest polluters of the city’s environment. Government policies and infrastructure projects which encouraged the explosive growth of private vehicles in the last 20 years — also considered a boost for the economy — have been responsible for air and noise pollution across the city. Mumbai’s lack of open space, at a measly 0.88 square metres per person and not distributed evenly for all population, is by now a textbook case given that New Delhi has about 15 square metres and New York has nearly 2.5 square metres.

The Mumbai Climate Action Plan noted that in merely five years between 2016 and 2021, the city had lost 2,028 hectares of tree cover — roughly one-and-half times the Aarey Colony area. This has to have a direct link to the massive emission of 19,640 tonnes of CO2 per year, and the alarming levels of air pollution that has continued for weeks — a link that is perhaps indecipherable to Fadnavis and the Economic Advisory Council, as also to all those who are yet to comprehend or accept that the poor ecological health of the city will mean low quality of life with people who are chronically ill, and eventually a compromised economy too.

If Fadnavis and Chief Minister Eknath Shinde refuse to wake up and get going on a comprehensive Ecological Plan for Mumbai and MMR, not only will the ambition of the state’s trillion-dollar economy remain a daydream but Mumbai's future in every respect will be severely compromised.


Smruti Koppikar, journalist and urban chronicler, writes extensively on cities, development, gender, and media. She is the Founder Editor of ‘Question of Cities’

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