National Centre for Sustainable Coastal Management wraps up verification of 23,000 wetlands in Maharashtra

This paves the way for the waterbodies to be formally notified and brought under legal protection.

Mumbai: The National Centre for Sustainable Coastal Management (NCSCM) has completed the documentation and ground-truthing of all but 11 of Maharashtra’s 23,415 wetlands, paving the way for the waterbodies to be formally notified and brought under legal protection under the Wetlands (Conservation and Management) Rules, official records show.

Ground-truthing refers to the physical verification of wetlands on site to confirm their existence, boundaries, ecological condition and present land use against satellite imagery — a crucial step before wetlands can be officially notified under environmental protection laws.

According to the latest data uploaded on the Maharashtra wetlands dashboard maintained by the NCSCM, the remaining 11 wetlands awaiting verification are in Pune district, where field-level ground-truthing is still under way.

The wetlands documented so far include 247 in Thane, 1,093 in Raigad, 37 in Mumbai city and 210 in Mumbai suburban districts. Ahmednagar district has the highest number of wetlands in the State at 1,596, followed by Nashik with 1,236 and Chandrapur which has 1,231 wetlands.

The NCSCM, functioning under the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), was tasked by the Maharashtra government with satellite mapping, documentation and field verification of wetlands identified under the National Wetlands Inventory and Assessment launched by the Centre nearly two decades ago.

T S Chanakya wetland in a bad shape.

Environmental groups said the completion of the exercise marks a critical stage because wetlands that are not officially notified remain vulnerable to reclamation, debris dumping, encroachments and destruction in the name of infrastructure development.

“This process should not have taken 16 years after the National Wetland Atlas was launched,” said B N Kumar, director of NatConnect Foundation. The MoEFCC launched the decadal-change version of the National Wetland Atlas in 2020 to track changes in wetlands over time, but Maharashtra’s ground-truthing exercise continued to lag for years thereafter.

“The prolonged delay has already caused considerable damage to Maharashtra’s wetland ecosystem, particularly in biodiversity-rich areas of Uran and the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, where wetlands have remained under constant attack from debris dumping, encroachments and reckless land reclamation. With the ground-truthing exercise now almost complete, the government must immediately notify these wetlands and provide them legal protection.”

Nandakumar Pawar, director of Sagarshakti, said Maharashtra could no longer afford bureaucratic delays in protecting wetlands.

“The burial of wetlands in Uran has already triggered unseasonal flooding and compensation payouts worth crores from taxpayers’ money. This could have been avoided had the authorities acted in time to preserve these natural drainage systems,” Pawar said.

Wetlands perform critical ecological functions such as flood buffering, groundwater recharge, carbon sequestration and biodiversity conservation. They also act as natural sponges during extreme rainfall events — a role that has become increasingly important amid changing climate patterns and recurring urban floods.

The Maharashtra exercise gathered momentum following legal interventions by Vanashakti and subsequent Supreme Court directions asking States and Union Territories to complete wetland demarcation and verification in a time-bound manner.

Officials said the verified wetland maps and documentation would now be forwarded to district administrations and the State wetland authority before the formal notification process begins.