The recent decision by the Bombay High Court to sanction the removal of over 45,000 mangroves for the Versova-Bhayander coastal road project is not merely a controversial legal ruling, but an act of ecological harakiri.
For a city that exists on the precipice of climate disaster, viewing these coastal forests as dispensable obstacles to infrastructure is a fatal error. Mangroves are not simply trees that can be uprooted and tallied in a ledger elsewhere; they are the first line of defense for a metropolis that is increasingly vulnerable to rising sea levels and erratic monsoon fury. To sever this protective limb is to invite the ocean into our living rooms.
The most jarring aspect of this approval is the bureaucratic sleight of hand known as compensatory afforestation. The civic body has proposed, and the court has accepted, a plan to plant trees in Chandrapur to offset the loss in Mumbai.
Chandrapur is a landlocked district located nearly 900 kilometers away in the Vidarbha region. It sits in a completely different ecological zone, facing entirely different climatic challenges. Suggesting that a sapling planted in the central hinterlands can compensate for a mature mangrove protecting the western coast is a farce. It is akin to removing the roof of a house in Mumbai and offering to build a garden shed in Nagpur as compensation. The floodwaters surging into Versova will not be halted by a tree growing hundreds of kilometres away.
This decision exposes a profound lack of imagination among our bureaucracy, who seem incapable of envisioning development outside the prism of concrete and tarmac. The prevailing logic suggests that the only path to modernization is to pave over the natural world.
The Versova-Bhayander link is touted as a necessary evolution for connectivity, promising to slash travel times. Yet, this convenience comes at a price that will be paid in waterlogging, soil erosion, and the destruction of marine breeding grounds. We are trading the city’s long-term survival for a few minutes of saved commute time. The administration treats nature as a vendor they can negotiate with, assuming that ecological services can be outsourced to distant geographies without consequence.
We need only look East to see how a nation that respects its geography handles similar threats. Japan, a country intimate with the devastating power of the ocean, did not respond to the 2011 tsunami by merely pouring more concrete. They turned to nature. The Japanese government and local communities initiated massive projects to plant millions of Japanese Black Pines along their coastlines.
These are not ornamental gardens but functional, living seawalls. The deep roots of the Black Pine bind the sandy soil, preventing erosion, while their dense canopies dissipate the kinetic energy of tsunami waves and storm surges.
The Japanese approach acknowledges a truth that Mumbai ignores: you cannot fight the sea, or Mother Nature; you must work with it. Their strategy integrates “grey” infrastructure like sea walls with “green” infrastructure like pine forests. They understand that while concrete degrades, a forest regenerates.
In contrast, Mumbai is systematically dismantling its green infrastructure, be it Aarey or elsewhere. The 45,000+ mangroves slated for the axe are the city’s natural sponges. They absorb excess water, trap sediments, and break the force of tidal waves. During the deluge of July 2005, it was these very ecosystems that mitigated what could have been an even greater catastrophe. Removing them now, as climate change accelerates the frequency of extreme weather events, is an invitation to disaster.
The court’s stipulation for annual reporting on the afforestation is a weak safeguard. Monitoring saplings in Chandrapur will not bring back the biodiversity lost in the creeks of Mumbai. The damage to the intertidal ecosystem is permanent. The fish, crabs, and birds that rely on these mangroves will vanish, and with them, the livelihoods of the indigenous Koli fishing communities. We are witnessing a systemic failure to value natural capital. The obsession with wanton commerce has blinded the city’s custodians to the reality that a drowned city has no economy.
If Mumbai is to survive the century, it must abandon this archaic model of development. We need infrastructure that accounts for the rising tides, not projects that remove our only shield against them. The Versova-Bhayander road may well be built, but without the mangroves, there might not be much of a city left to connect.
