BMC's plan to develop Mumbai a paper vision: Activists

Mumbai's Development Plan 2034 emphasises saving natural areas by not allowing them to be pitted for development. It concentrates on maintaining and safeguarding open spaces. And it shields Aarey forest, the city's green lung, from future projects other than the proposed Metro car shed and zoo.

These are the claims the BMC makes. And environmentalists have trashed them all.

The DP, unveiled on Wednesday and to be notified in a fortnight, seems to be focussed on housing and construction activity while sidelining the key aspects of environment and sustainability, they said.

Stalin D, Vanashakti NGO's director for conservation, said his and other organisations were "very surprised" at this declaration made about Aarey without consulting the eco-sensitive zone committee. "We will question if the zoo and Metro proposals, the latter of which is still pending in court, were cleared by the committee before they configured in the DP," he said.

Ecologists also have their doubts about protections extended to natural spaces, as the civic authorities themselves have got clearances for several projects that pass through such spaces, he said.

He criticised the BMC for counting rivers and creeks as open spaces without any realistic planning to ensure that they can be accessed by the common man. "They are busy creating a road next to a wall along the river without actually understanding what the components of a river are," he said.

But Stalin and other environmentalists added a caveat to their excoriation. "We will have to go through the entire document to understand it in detail. On the face of it, though, it looks sugarcoated."

Urban planner Sulakshana Mahajan said the entire planning process is outdated. The basis of such massive city plans should be based on three aspects — social, economic and environmental. All three need to complement each other. They cannot operate be in isolation, Mahajan said.

"According to me," she said, "having a 20-year plan for a city is a redundant concept given the fast-changing socio-economics of Mumbai. There should instead be a five-year plan, which can be reviewed every year. This allows for course correction through thorough auditing of yearly progress," she said.

Just because the DP talks about open spaces, she said, does not make it pro-environment. A lot of factors affect the environment at large including transportation, which is going to play a bigger role in the coming years.

"There are so m nay layers to it," she said, and bluntly proclaimed: "I don't have any hopes from this DP. It is not even made by qualified people."