Mumbai DP 2034: Planners have no hope, it's business as usual for builders

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 has made. 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 while sidelining the key environment and sustainability, they said.

Stalin D, Vanashakti NGO’s director for conservation, said his and other organisations were “very surprised” at this declaration about Aarey without consulting the eco-sensitive zone committee. “We will question if the zoo and Metro proposals, the latter of which is pending in court, were cleared by the panel 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 projects that go through such spaces.

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Stalin criticised the BMC for counting rivers and creeks as open spaces without any realistic planning to ensure they can be accessed by the public. “They are busy creating a road along a river without understanding what the components of a river are.”

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Urban planner Sulakshana Mahajan said the entire planning process is outdated.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 social, economic and environmental. All three need to complement each other. They cannot operate be in isolation, Mahajan 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 5-year plan which can be reviewed each year. This allows for course correction through audits of yearly progress,” she said.

Source: DNA India