Newlinkroad's Blog

In a strange series of incidents, at Dahisar and Borivali in the North West part of Mumbai, home to millions of people, there is a war going on.

The residents who love nature are pitted against people who are dumping debris into lush mangrove forests here.
It all started with a perceived scarcity of housing in Mumbai in the early 2000’s.
Even as there are thousands of apartment blocks lying locked, mainly bought by rich people as an investment, there is a strong lobby of builders and media who want to project an image of scarcity of housing. Their main motive is to keep the demand high to keep prices high.
Feeding on the dreams of common people to own a house of their own, and encouraged by financial institutions sitting on a huge pile of capital, an artificial picture of scarcity has been created.
To solve this so called scarcity of residential homes, a lobby developed a proposal to use salt pan land lying on the coastal areas of Mumbai .
The excuse they are using is that salt pan land can be used to house slum dwellers! Slum dwellers form almost 50% of Mumbai’s population, often occupying government land which has not been guarded by the authorities concerned. Now, instead of evicting the slum dwellers, our policy makers are creating another problem by proposing to ‘rehabilitate’ them on ecologically sensitive salt pan land!
Salt pans in Dahisar have been lying unused since the 80’s.
Suddenly the residents here find that there is a lot of interest in this huge patch of mangrove land admeasuring almost 340 acres. Expensive cars, Politicians from Mira Bhayander, and other infamous people including the Thakur family have been hanging around the New Link Road. The property in question is full of lush green mangroves adjoining the Gorai creek which connects to the Arabian sea via Malad.

The Bombay Environmental Action Group has been fighting to preserve Mumbai’s environment since decades. Debi Goenka the founder and Stalin from Conservation action Trust have taken the battle to the highest court, the Supreme court of India.
At the Supreme court, the lawyers for the Kamathia’s, alleged owners of the land where there used to be salt pans, said they want to repair the salt pan bunds. Based on the letter given to them by the Mumbai suburban collector, the honourable Judges passed an order in March 2010 allowing repair of bunds, with severe restrictions as to not to destroy any mangroves.