AAREY: THE LIFE OF A ‘FOREST’
Mumbai’s Aarey Colony has been in the news for all the wrong reasons, be it the decision of the Bombay High Court rejecting petitions to declare Mumbai’s Aarey Colony a protected forest or the felling of trees within hours of a high court decision or the framing of criminal charges against those defending the tree felling. Although the Supreme Court restrained the authorities on October 7 from cutting any more trees in Aarey Colony, it was already too late. The Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation informed the court that it had already cut 2,141 of the 2,185 trees identified for felling. Meanwhile, the 29 arrested citizen protesters were released on bail, but here again the damage had already been done, with serious criminal charges filed against them under four sections of the Indian Penal Code.
Aarey Colony, spread over 1,287 hectares of land, is home to around 450,000 trees, a number of endangered species and 27 tribal hamlets. Over the past five decades, local and state authorities have clandestinely parcelled out hundreds of hectares of Aarey Colony to various commercial and development projects. The Mumbai Metro car shed project, which was assigned 33 hectares of land, is only the latest of these. Opinion in the city has been divided over questions of the economic viability and environmental cost of addressing the transportation needs of the city. But another area of serious concern is the undemocratic and obscure methods employed to expedite the completion of metro rail projects.
Despite public outrage and the
availability of alternative locations, the authorities have cut through all opposition to denotify 165 ha. of Aarey land, which is now available for ‘commercial’ use from being a ‘No Development Zone’. The government has vehemently argued in open court that Aarey is not a forest, without presenting supporting documents and records in the public domain about the land status. The BMC Tree Authority expert members weren’t given enough time to examine all the details in the inventory list and there were many discrepancies in the tree inventory data collected at the project site in 2012, 2014 and 2017.
The alacrity with which the felling started within hours of the Bombay High Court’s October 4 order stands in sharp contrast to the authorities’ lack of enthusiasm about implementing several previous orders, including one from the same high court, to provide basic amenities to thousands of Warli tribals—a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group (PVTG)—living in Aarey Colony since 1861. Even constitutional provisions to protect PVTGs from discrimination and oppression have been disregarded and this has been possible because the land status of Aarey is so nebulous. Environment campaigners, too, are mainly focused on Aarey’s lush vegetation; no great concern for the rights of thousands of vulnerable Aarey Colony tribals has been evident in public discussions or courtrooms.
Meanwhile, Mumbai Metro Corp. has brushed aside the environmental concerns of citizens as a self-indulgent fantasy, claiming that the project will, in fact, have a significant positive impact, reducing CO2 emissions by 261,000 tonnes/ year. While this may sound like a promising step towards India’s Intended Nationally Determined Contributions in the Paris Agreement, given the absence of any approved methodologies for such estimates and the lack of authentic baseline data, Mumbai Metro’s statements amount to little more than grandstanding. The Maharashtra government, too, has been tom-tomming the potential environmental gains from the metro project, but its own record in enforcing environmental laws in the state has been very disappointing. The sheer number of environmental cases from Maharashtra in the Western Bench of the NGT (National Green Tribunal) are testimony to this. Perhaps the government should pay more attention to the Preamble to the Paris Agreement, which calls for all States to “respect, promote and consider their respective obligations on human rights”. Instead, threats and violence against protesters have only increased in the past week following the protest in Aarey. ■
Activists, focused on Aarey’s trees, have shown no great concern for the colony’s vulnerable tribals