The Sanjay Gandhi national park : decay of falling trees
- lauresabatier5
- 25 janv. 2021
- 7 min de lecture
Dernière mise à jour : 11 févr. 2021
The Sanjay Gandhi National park (SGNP) area has a long history dating back to the 4th century BC. If walking around as a one-day tourist is an opportunity to discover the remarkably well-preserved Buddhist statues and caves, I would definitely say that the most impressive part of the experience is the contrast between the Bolivari train station which serves the park and the silence of the place after a few minutes of walking. The hustle and bustle gives way to the calm of small lakes bordered by a dense, green forest - the last memory of the swamps that were Mumbai before the 18th century.
Remembrance of the past, a green oasis in the heart of the concrete block, the National Park faces today a series of challenges that seem to be leading to its demise.
The silence bubble of the park is home to an unique ecosystem in a large city like Mumbai, which brings together 20% of the tribal population of Maharashtra, 270 different species of birds, 35 species of mammals and 1 300 species of plants. This group of diverse inhabitants is under the threat of a very pressuring real-estate demand which is gradually eroding the boundaries of the park. The situation is such that escaped leopards or children eaten by cheetahs often make the headlines in local newspapers, highlighting the proximity between two worlds that are as close as they are distant. Since the creation of the SNGP in 1983, Mumbai has extended to Greater Mumbai while aggressively urbanising the Thane surrounding (North) and coming closer and closer to the park. For Emilie Edelblutte, the main dysfunction of these years of expansion is the lack of consideration toward the need of a buffer zone to protect the areas and populations of the park. In an urban national park, the buffer zone concept has neither legal existence nor operational value, which leads to a fortress-like management of the park from both authorities and activists.
The development projects around the park are multiplying, increasing the threat to it. It would be pointless to review them all, given their different geographical scales, legal situations and concrete progress, but let’s have an overlook at the most advanced one. Inside the park itself, three main project are getting serious : the Maharashtra state road development cooperation (MSRDC) plans to build an underground tunnel from Borivali to Thane (1), the BMC is blueprinting a nine-km tunnel under the park, the mulund-goregaon link road (GMLR) and a ropeway project between Borivali and Thane is under discussion since 2016. More broadly outside the park other projects are standing as a threat to the border of SGNP. Among all of them, we can note the progressive destruction of the wildlife corridor that connects SGNP with the Tungareshwar National Park involved, among others, by the national highway project between Mumbai and Delhi and the widening of Ghodbunder road that abuts the park (2). Moreover, 26 building complex projects have already been submitted for the year 2021.
According to Bittu Saghal, editor of Sanctuary magazine, the park will die : “why are we attacking “green” and pretending that it is some form of service to citizens ? They are selling us mirage of happiness using concrete. They don’t understand how much vulnerable Mumbai will become if the park is destroyed”. from these words emerge schematically the two points of view commonly put forward by the authorities to justify their projects: development versus archaism. While defending the park would be an attempt to oppose the modernisation of Mumbai, using its land and reshaping it would be a path to the dream of many Indian politicians: to make Mumbai a new Shanghai. But what should be understood is that the suffocation of SGNP will not make Mumbai an ultra-modern city, but a dying one. The risk isn’t just to the park, but also to the whole city. SGNP acts as the city’s primary carbon sink, absorbing tons of CO2 and keeping temperatures down. It is an important water source as well, as it houses the Tulsi and Vihar Lake.
It is therefore necessary to question the desirability of the destruction of the park, and to understand the political opportunism behind it. The Aarey forest, which has been the subject of much turmoil in 2019, is an example of these issues. Let’s have a look at since I had the chance to witness the protest and mobilization around it in my host university.
The politic hanging from the branches of falling trees : Zoom on the Aarey forest
Considered as a kind of buffer zone for the SGNP, the Aarey forest, also known as the Aarey Milk Colony is located next to Goregaon on the West-South of the park, and is considered as a mixed deciduous forest. Home to at least 86 species of trees, 22 species of birds and five species of animals which feature in the International Union for Conservation of Nature (such as leopards or sambar deer), the forest is known as a model of human-leopard coexistence in an urban setting, notably for its camera monitoring and its leopard rescue civil team. Since the MMRCL has decided to destroy a part of it to accomodate a metro car shed, Aarey became a key political issue in the context of the coming state election. On the 30th August 2019, the tree authority gave the authorisation to cut down 2700 trees of the forest to host the metro car shed, a decision that has been confirmed by the Bombay High Court on the 4th october. The state elections being on the 21th october, the High Court has been accused of giving its decision on a key date, just before the week-end and Dussehra holidays in order to give time to the MMRCL to start cutting trees. This has indeed led to the cutting down of trees on the 5th october, causing a riot between activists and the police. Leading to many arrestation, the protest has been mostly followed on social media, specially through #saveaarey on twitter.
Two elements of this case are particularly significant in understanding the nature of the political decisions taken for development in Mumbai. The first is the police and political repression surrounding the pro-forest protesters. Beyond police custody, the authorities sought above all to present them as conservatives opposed to the metro itself. On the contrary, the metro being a means of reducing individual transport, the environmental activists are not opposed to it on the substance but on the realisation: they are in favour of the metro, but not for its construction in Aarey. This leads us to the second point: the choice of Aarey for the metro shell stems from a political opportunism which boasts of progressivism but acts under the influence of economics and chance. In fact, activists and protestors claim that there are at least seven other areas where the metro shed could be alternatively constructed, seven options that have been denied by the government without any credible study. Among them, the Kanjumarg Land is seen as the most relevant solution but this unused salt-pan land that has turned into a dry land has been rejected because of additional costs due to 10km additional line. Those costs appear to be a fake argument since a huge area of 97 hectares within Kanjurmarg isn’t disputed and is litigation free, and since a line had to pass by anyway for metro 6. For many activists, the refusal to opt for Kanjurmarg is in fact explained by the prospect of considerable enrichment promised by the clearing of Aarey in terms of building construction. Far from environmental concerns, the state is concerned above all with modernising the city, without first asking the question of the future resilience of the area around Aarey, and more generally of Mumbai.
Humans living under falling trees: the issue of tribal populations
While the progressive trimming of the park is playing with the forests in order to gain strength, it is relying on an interweaving of legal status in order to overlook the human populations living in the SGNP.
Several tribal groups live in the park. The Warli represents the majority of them but the Koli and the Dubla are also located there, all of them are partially or entirely dependent on the forest and exposed to a long historical process of territorial despoliation since the XIX century. Started under the British, this despoliation has gradually transformed the tribals populations into taxable and sedentary peasants while the constitution gave them the status of “scheduled tribes” in 1950.
Today, those populations are stuck between the real-eastate pressure of those who want to drive them out of the park, and those who perceive them as a significant electorate, within which some illegal residents could be legalize in order to buy and sell their property (some tribals became residents of slums, which are illegal). Even if their “scheduled tribes'' status protects them from being expelled from the park, the narrowing of the park’s boundaries and the illegal status of their home push them more and more under threat.
According to the case study of Émilie Edelbutte, the other side of the coin is a massive ngo lobby that follows the colonial idea of the necessity to keep man far from the forest, as if the tribals were a danger to their environment.
I did not get the chance to meet with any tribals nor ngo activist, my only conclusion toward what I could read (and that you will fine at the end), is that a balance between regularization of the tribals and conservation of the park should lead to the fusion of the ecologic and scheduled populations fight for the conservation of the overall ecosystem of the park.
The hand that makes trees fall: beyond Mumbai, a national concern
With hindsight, Mumbai National Park seems to suffer not only from inconsistent local politics but from a national political will that is resolutely hostile to forest conservation in India. If NASA recently released a study showing the increase of forests in India over the last 20 years, it was without counting on the change in the definition of "forest", which now allows any type of agricultural production to be included under this name. There are no clear figures on the decline of forests in India, but it seems that the Modi government has given forest clearance to 99.82% of the industrial projects over the past five years.
To know more on the subject
About Bittu Saghal's views on the SGNP
A case study on tribal population of SGNP
A video to understand the ins and outs of the project around Aarey forest
The pictures of this article are all coming from open sources and edited by myself
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