POLITICAL TURMOIL REIGNITES DEBATE OVER CONSERVING AAREY FOREST

MUMBAI: The movement to protect Aarey Colony as a legal forest, which began in response to the proposed Metro-3 car shed at Prajapurpada village, marks one of the most heated debates around conservation and urban development in Mumbai’s recent past.

In October 2019, the Bombay high court (HC) quashed a clutch of petitions by environmentalists that sought to declare a 33-acre plot in the city’s green lung as a legal forest under the Indian Forest Act (1927). This patch was demarcated in 2013 to construct a car shed for the Metro 3 line.

Thousands of citizens held protests over the cutting of trees. Environmentalists and Aarey’s indigenous adivasi residents maintained that the plot performs all the ecosystem functions one associates with forests, from providing a home to leopards, to acting as a sponge which absorbs run-off from the nearby Mithi River during heavy rainfall.

Soon after the HC’S ruling, the Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation chopped 98% of the 2,185 trees on that site. In November 2019, after the Uddhav Thackeray-led government came to power, it reversed the previous government’s decision and allotted 102acres of land in Kanjurmarg to build the car shed on. In 2021, it also notified 800 acres of uninhabited green cover in Aarey Colony — which is spread over an area of 3180-odd acres— as a reserve forest under the IFA.

“What Uddhav Thackeray did was unimaginable. In a city where people are fighting over every square inch of land, he took 800 acres of it and closed it off to development. It sets a huge precedent for conservation. Now it feels like we are back to square one, but... we are prepared to fight again,” said Stalin D, director of NGO Vanashakti, one of the petitioners.