Maharashtra: Metro-3 depot back in Aarey Colony

The movement to protect Aarey Colony as a legal forest, which began in response to the proposed Metro-3 car shed at Prajapurpada village, marks one of the most heated debates around conservation and urban development in Mumbai’s recent past.

In October 2019, the Bombay high court (HC) quashed a clutch of petition by environmentalists that sought to declare a 33-acre plot in the city’s green lung as a legal forest under the Indian Forest Act (1927). This patch was demarcated in 2013 to construct a car shed for the upcoming Metro 3 line.

Thousands of citizens held protests over the cutting of trees. Environmentalists and Aarey’s indigenous adivasi residents, who organised under the banner of Save Aarey, maintained that the plot performs all the ecosystem functions one associates with forests, from providing a home to leopards, to acting as a sponge which absorbs run-off from the nearby Mithi River during episodes of heavy rain, helping to prevent flooding on the Marol-Maroshi Road.

Soon after the HC’s ruling, the Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation (MMRC) chopped 98% of the 2,185 trees in that site. In November 2019, after the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government came to power, it reversed the previous government’s decision and allotted 102-acres of land in Kanjurmarg to build the car shed on. In 2021, it also notified 800 acres of uninhabited green cover in Aarey Colony — which is spread over an area of 3180-odd acres— as a reserve forest under the IFA.

However, the 33 acres in question were not part of this newly-minted legal forest.

“What Uddhav Thackeray did was unimaginable. In a city where people are fighting over every square inch of land, he took 800 acres of it and closed it off to development. It sets a huge precedent for conservation. Now it feels like we are back to square one, but the new government should be aware, we are prepared to fight again,” said Stalin D, director of NGO Vanashakti, one of the petitioners.

Devil in the details

In October 2020, former environment minister Aaditya Thackeray had said that the 33-acre plot would be handed over to the forest department for “safekeeping”. He also gave an assurance of notifying as much of the remaining 2,380 odd acres of Aarey Colony as possible under the ambit of the IFA. Neither of these assurances materialised.

Stalin and others pointed out that despite the MVA’s good intentions the conflict over the 33-acre plot remains a matter of concern, as it does not fall within the ambit of the IFA and, therefore, does not attract any of the statutory provisions of the Forest Conservation Act (1980).

Put simply, the MMRC (a joint venture between the government of India and the state of Maharashtra), which acquired the land in 2016-17 for the purpose of building the car shed, can go ahead and build on it without obtaining forest clearance (FC).

Experts said that there was another route that the government could have taken to protect the 33 acres from development.

Zaman Ali, a city-based environmental lawyer who represented Vanashakti in petitions before the HC and the Supreme Court, said, “The declaration of the remaining area of Aarey under Section 4 of the Forest Act should have been done immediately after the first phase of declaring 800 acres as a reserve forest.”

“Even if the earlier government didn’t include the 33-acre plot in the forest area, they could have cancelled the land use reservation for Metro-3 Car Depot on this land and reverted back to ‘no development zone’, or ‘green zone’, which was created especially for the rest of Aarey. Even this wasn’t done,” said Amrita Bhattacharjee, one of the petitioners before the HC.

A senior official in the state forest department, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that notifying the plot in question under Section 4 of the IFA would have only aggravated the conflict between the state and Centre. “Yes, we could have declared the car shed plot under Section 4 of the IFA, which would have automatically brought the Forest Conservation Act into play and given the plot some level of protection, but the land is in the custody of MMRC. They acquired it by legal means. We would have worsened Centre-State relations which were already strained because of the Kanjurmarg land issue,” they said.

In October 2020, Thackeray scrapped the recommendations made by a committee appointed by the Fadnavis government, and another by his own government, both of which stated that the Kanjurmarg land was unviable for the Metro-3 depot owing to escalation in cost and project execution time.

Instead, the government instituted a third committee which concluded that the Metro 3 line could easily be merged with Metro 6, and that an integrated depot could come up at Kanjurmarg. This was also the recommendation of a 2015 technical committee report.

“However, despite clear orders to both MMRC and MMRDA, till date no work has started to connect Metro 3 and Metro 6 lines. This would easily have fixed the issue, but the project proponents essentially acted like free radicals and created the space for this current situation. In essence, we have 800 acres of forest in Aarey, but the real point of conflict was never actually resolved,” said Zoru Bhatena, another petitioner.

A petition by Vanashakti seeking forest status for the entirety of Aarey Colony is pending adjudication in the Supreme Court.