All at sea over Sea Link future

The Maharashtra government seems hell-bent on extending the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, both southwards to Nariman Point and northwards to Versova, by a coastal road, which, it believes, the recent relaxation of the coastal regulation zone laws permit it to do. However, central environment ministry officials have indicated that coastal roads are not permissible because they involve reclamation. Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh is visiting Mumbai on April 15 to take a final call.

What the government is proposing are coastal roads and viaducts from Worli southwards and tunnelling through Malabar Hill to H20 Boating Club at Chowpatty. But here is the catch: it will have to reclaim 10.6 hectares at Priyadarshini Park as the access to the tunnel.

The environment ministry is in principle opposed to reclamation because it exposes other areas of the city’s coastline to the fury of the sea. Thus, the extensive reclamation of Backbay in the 1960s and 1970s has made areas like the Dadar beach and Versova extremely vulnerable to erosion. Mumbai’s planners ought also to be aware that the Konkan coast around Mumbai has witnessed a rise of 5cm in 20 years, as sea levels rise with climate change.

It is true that coastal roads are far cheaper than sea links, but the ecology of the city should not be tinkered with in this fashion. It was for this very reason that chief minister Prithviraj Chauhan objected to the reclamation schemes off Nariman Point and in the Thane creek, which were recently proposed by Surbana

Consultants from Singapore as part of the makeover of Mumbai.
A better alternative is to build roads on stilts, which will be more expensive than coastal roads but cheaper than sea links, which cost Rs325 crore per km. This appears obligatory when it comes to extending the existing sea link northwards in the suburbs. At Bandra, the Portuguese Fort, the new 40-storey Taj Hotel opposite the Taj Land’s End, the Otters Club and the swathe of mangroves make a road on stilts as far seaward as possible, west of these edifices, mandatory.

The Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation has fortunately given up its harebrained plan to tunnel under the sand on Juhu beach . Activists are wondering whether, instead of desecrating the 5-km-long beach, which is one of the iconic landmarks of Mumbai, the authorities cannot consider using the two north-south roads in the old Juhu airport area, which can be easily widened to take the traffic.

Ironically, the authorities are currently trying to undertake a beach “nourishment” scheme at Dadar-Prabhadevi in an attempt to stem the erosion of the sand. Such schemes have been initiated, for instance, at Cancun in Mexico, at a cost of $71 million. Under no circumstances should Mumbai’s major beach, which caters to thousands every day, be destroyed for the minority who constitute motorists.