Roads vs Trees | How Mumbai’s planners are destroying the city

Officials can get away by saying ‘we have no space to plant trees’ or, ‘whatever’s happening, it’s better than Delhi’, only because they and their political bosses don’t have to face the brunt of their destructive acts

Twenty years ago, the MMRDA, the government body responsible for planning in Mumbai, decided to chop 121 trees on a 3-km suburban road, which it had decided to widen. But it didn’t think it necessary to inform those who’d have been most affected. This author, unwilling to believe rumours, inquired with the MMRDA office, and was told the residents ought to be thrilled they were getting a brand new 90-foot road.

It took a sustained struggle on the road and off it for the MMRDA to accept an alternate plan that saved the canopy of trees that set apart this nondescript road from others, and which, even in Mumbai’s punishing summers, lowered the temperature as soon as one entered it.

Significantly, the tree authority of the city’s municipal corporation, set up to protect its trees, played no role in this struggle. Why would it? It was this authority that allowed the destruction of this mini urban forest. It was only after the struggle got media attention that the tree superintendent intervened.

This episode encapsulates all the elements that have helped strip Mumbai of its trees over these last two decades, and made Mumbaikars suffer frequent heat waves (three in the last month alone), despite being fortunate enough to live right on the sea: a planning authority accountable only to the chief minister; a city corporation indifferent to its duties; and a government oblivious to the climate change that is rendering life unbearable for many.

Mumbai’s planners have recently cut between 700 and 3,000 trees for a single project. It is revealing that when Mumbai’s tree cover is at its lowest, the tree authority has decided it has no need for tree experts. This year, only politicians have been appointed to its board. A civic official was candid enough to admit that the tree authority members didn’t ‘appreciate’ experts because the latter ‘tended to have strong views’. One expert revealed that after she had objected to the cutting of over 2,000 trees for a metro shed in 2019, the authority stopped informing her of meetings, and then sacked her for non-attendance.

This brazen disregard for trees isn’t restricted to anonymous officials; it comes from the very top. Tree-cutting in Mumbai is subject to mandatory compensatory planting of trees. In fact, that’s the rule normally cited by judges to allow large-scale tree cutting. But it will no longer be followed in Mumbai.

Recently, the additional municipal commissioner announced that there is no space left to plant trees within the city, so they have begun planting them outside, thereby defeating the very rationale of the rule. Abandoning projects that involve cutting down thousands of trees is, of course, out of the question, even though the ordinary Mumbaikar won’t suffer if they were scrapped, since many of these projects cater primarily to private transport. In fact, the opposite is true: ordinary Mumbaikars, 47% of whom walk to work, will be hurt very badly by the loss of tree cover that these new highways and link roads entail.

According to the assistant commissioner, 30-40 hectares would be required for compensatory tree plantation. This reveals both the scale of deforestation that’s taken place, as well as the lack of imagination among our town planners. Instead of searching for large land parcels, which apparently the state government owns, why don’t they simply start by planting trees along the sides of highways, roads, and pavements? The excuse that these trees would interfere with underground utilities is laughable.

Officials can get away with saying things like ‘we have no space to plant trees’ or ‘whatever’s happening, it’s better than Delhi’, the comment made by an official to citizens protesting the proposed cutting of 45,000 mangroves for an extension to the Coastal Road, only because they and their political bosses don’t have to face the brunt of their destructive acts. Those that do — the gig workers, house helps, postmen and salesmen, peons and security guards, auto and taxi drivers. and hawkers — in fact, the entire unorganised sector that forms the majority of our working population, cannot afford to protest.

But the middle class can. In Mumbai, citizens’ protests have had mixed results. One such protest saved a beloved garden from being wrecked; another plan to chop down 125 Pink Trumpet trees that transform a bleak highway every year has been challenged in front of the National Green Tribunal.

Mumbai’s oldest areas bear the names of trees that stood on them hundreds of years ago: Bhindi Bazar, Laburnum Road, Tamarind Street, Babulnath, Wadala. If citizens are determined, it should be possible to regain that sensibility in this increasingly treeless city.

Jyoti Punwani is a senior journalist.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH).