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Hindustan Times
15-07-2025
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
SNGP director flags challenges in removing encroachments
MUMBAI: The director of Sanjay Gandhi National Park, in his recent affidavit to the Bombay High Court, said 10 places -- in Uttan, Bhiwandi, Kalyan, Ambernath, Shahpur, and Murban -- were inspected on June 6 by concerned authorities, including the forest department and housing board officials, to relocate illegal encroachers at Sanjay Gandhi National Park and were found to be unsuitable. Mumbai, India. June 05, 2025: Top view of Sanjay Gandhi National Parl and Borivali area of Mumbai Suburban. Mumbai, India. June 05, 2025. (Photo by Raju Shinde/HT Photo) (Hindustan Times) This is in response to the court's January orders in a contempt petition filed in 2023 by the Conservation Action Trust and its executive trustee, Debi Goenka, in the Bombay High Court, alleging non-compliance to its 2003 judgment directing removal of encroachments, rehabilitation of eligible encroachers, and construction of a boundary around the park. The affidavit states that the inspected sites either lacked electricity, water supply, sewage and drainage facilities or fell under no development zones (NDZ) and Green Zones. Additionally, in May 2025, they were to identify eligible families for rehabilitation. However, due to non-cooperation by encroachers over unwarranted apprehensions, this could not take place. The survey period was then extended till the end of July 2025. Another affidavit submitted on March 5, set a May 31 deadline to demolish commercial-use encroachment on the forest land. These were located among residential-use encroachment areas in tightly-packed hutment colonies, making it difficult to access for demolition. The July 11 affidavit states that these demolitions were initially planned for May 5 and 6. However, they were postponed because of the non-availability of police bandobast and then due to opposition from 2,000 to 2,500 people led by local political leaders. On May 26, a former corporator of the Thane Municipal Corporation (TMC) allegedly gathered a hostile crowd and obstructed the demolition squad. 'There was a very real possibility of violence breaking out against the Forest Department officials and staff along with the police personnel; the demolition program was abandoned,' the affidavit said. The affidavit also highlighted that the state issued 18 Government Resolutions and granted an administrative sanction of ₹221 crore for constructing boundary walls around the SGNP Division. Out of this, the forest department received ₹74.28 crore in the FY 2024-2025 and paid it over to the Public Works Department on March 31. On July 10, the executive engineer from PWD sent a letter to the SGNP administration stating that tenders for 17 works of boundary-wall construction. The technical and financial bids received for another 10 tenders were under scrutiny.
Hindustan Times
06-06-2025
- Business
- Hindustan Times
BMC's climate budget: old wine in a new bottle?
Mumbai: Jumping on the World Environment Day bandwagon, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) on Thursday put their money where their mouth is, announcing a ₹17,000-crore 'climate budget' for the city. The civic body claimed that 37% of its capital expenditure budget will go towards 'climate-allied' activities. These include a wide range of things, from the biomining of the Deonar dumping ground to electric buses for BEST and solar panels, along with the construction of toilets, water infrastructure, markets, homes for project-affected people (PAP), and new fire brigade stations, among others. The BMC has increased its climate budget from last year's ₹10,224.24 crore by including the Brihanmumbai Electricity Supply and Transport Undertaking (BEST) and seven more departments within it. Most of the activities listed in the budget are old BMC plans due to their effect on climate change. In March 2024, the BMC also created a new environment and climate change department. Claiming that its actions are working, the BMC also released data for greenhouse gas emissions till 2022-23, which showed a decrease from 2019-20 figures, but an increase from the Covid years in between. The BMC's climate spending takes its Mumbai Climate Action Plan (MCAP), launched in 2022, as its benchmark. The plan is a strategic framework to make Mumbai climate-resilient and achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. However, the ambit of the climate budget is wide. On the one hand, it concentrates on mitigating climate change, which would reduce greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, it also focuses on increasing the resilience of the city's population to the effects of climate change, i.e. adaptation. This gives the BMC a wide remit of activities to include under its climate spends. For instance, under unquantifiable actions taken, some of the activities listed include building toilets and installing sanitary napkin vending machines and incinerators in public toilets; laying water pipelines, constructing storage tanks, a new water treatment plant and a desalination plant to improve water supply; stabilisation of hill slopes to reduce disaster risk; concessions for BEST bus tickets to those with disabilities; laying sewer lines; new healthcare facilities; improvement of footpaths, construction and maintenance of foot-over-bridges; a transportation and commercial hub at Dahisar Check Naka, municipal markets, PAP homes for the Goregaon Mulund Link Road project; and even a swimming pool and sports complex. Environmentalists, who are not new to challenging the BMC, were sceptical of the lofty budget. 'How to destroy the climate for 364 days, and how to plan for correcting the destruction for one day: that is the crux of the BMC's climate action plan,' said Zoru Bhathena, an environmental activist. 'The budget doesn't mention anything new that the civic body shouldn't already be doing,' said Debi Goenka, executive trustee of the nonprofit Conservation Action Trust. 'Setting up LED lights was introduced 10 years ago. Why is it newly added in the budget? BEST has already placed orders for EV buses that have not been delivered yet, so it is the same thing repeating. Many measures that could be taken up are severely lacking, including simple things like adding solar panels at bus depots. All this while the BMC is continuing to cut trees rampantly.' Sumaira Abdulali, founder of the NGO Awaaz Foundation, concurred. 'The number of trees being cut for infrastructure projects will not be covered in the greening of islands that they have taken up,' she said. 'As per the climate budget report, the PM 2.5 and PM 10 levels have come down to about 85 on average. Averaging out the winter numbers with the whole year will definitely bring it down. That doesn't mean the pollution is less. Regulation of the construction sites doesn't need a different budget. There just has to be proper enforcement of the AQI norms,' she added.
Hindustan Times
30-05-2025
- General
- Hindustan Times
Practice what you preach, BMC told, on SWM draft bye-laws
MUMBAI: 'Practice what you preach' is one of the messages for the civic administration, which has invited suggestions and objections to its draft Municipal Solid Waste (Management & Handling) Cleanliness and Sanitation Bye-Laws 2025. With only two to go before the deadline to submit them, HT asked experts and activists to weigh in on the proposed bye-laws. Some also questioned how waste collection and segregation would be carried out in slums, while others focused on the missing role of informal waste pickers in the system. 'My main contention is that the BMC is itself not equipped to deal with what it is asking of citizens,' said Debi Goenka, executive trustee of the NGO Conservation Action Trust (CAT). 'Even when citizens segregate their waste into dry and wet, the BMC is often seen mixing the two, bringing citizens' efforts to nought.' In other words, Goenka said, the BMC doesn't practice what its bye-laws preach. Goenka also wondered how the civic administration proposed to enforce a whole new set of rules when there were ample gaps in infrastructure and implementation of the BMC's policies. 'The BMC talks about prohibiting littering, but there are far too few public bins and the ones that are there are often overflowing,' he said. 'Now, all of a sudden, the civic body is expecting homes to segregate waste into four categories. Yet there is little on the BMC's responsibility for providing the proper infrastructure for storage, and timely and proper segregated collection of the waste. 'They are also making it compulsory for bulk waste generators to compost wet waste within their own premises, but most lack any space to walk in their housing societies, occupied by parked cars. Even the latest Development Control Regulations (DCR) don't mandate space for this during construction,' Goenka said. He made another powerful point. 'There is no onus on the manufacturers of waste, especially plastic. Instead, they have introduced loopholes which allow manufactures to escape the rules with regard to plastic waste, simply by saying it will apply to those with the 'main component' of plastic. This is an easy way out for manufacturers producing tetrapacks,' he said. Kedar Sohoni, founder of the NGO Green Communities Foundation, highlighted the glaring lack of attention to waste in slums and the role of informal waste pickers in the system. 'In the slums, even simple door-to-door waste collection is broken. Most dump their garbage in community bins, which means no segregation,' he said, at a townhall on solid waste management, organised by Mumbai Donut CoLAB with other NGOs, on Wednesday. 'Neither have they taken steps to integrate waste pickers into the system, when ideally, they should be an integral part of the waste collection process, doing the door-to-door collection of segregated waste,' he said. Sohoni pointed out that the dry waste segregation centres, meant to sort dry waste at the ward level and dispatch it for recycling, are falling apart. 'The BMC should extend the consultative process on the bye-laws and work on improving them,' he said. Natasha D'Costa, founder of the NGO Start Upcycling Now, and who was also present at the townhall, said, 'The bye-laws make no mention of waste pickers. Rather, they state that all the waste will go to the BMC. This leaves the question of what will happen to private vendors and the unorganised sector, which forms the backbone of the unorganised waste market.' Meanwhile, Goenka, Sohini and D'Costa welcomed the BMC's decision to defer the user fee for garbage collection in Mumbai. 'The BMC has not provided a rationale for charging the fee, when we're already paying property tax, which is meant to cover these services,' said Goenka. In any case, Sohoni said, any user fee should be based on the volume of waste generated, not the area of the home. 'This gives an incentive to citizens to reduce their waste, rather than continuing to generate more waste as they're paying for it,' he said. Until now, over 2,500 responses have been submitted to the draft bye-laws, a substantial number relating to the now-deferred user fee.
