Save Aarey Protests: Yes, Mumbai needs trees but it needs a Metro too

Social media and news websites are abuzz with the Aarey forest, again. The last time, the forest was in news, it was 2019 when the then Maharashtra CM Uddhav Thackeray had relocated the proposed Colaba-Bandra-Seepz Metro Line 3 depot in the area to Kanjurmarg, east of Aarey, a day after assuming power. This move had led to a series of events which ultimately resulted in a stay on the car shed at Kanjurmarg and a cost escalation of roughly over ₹1000 crores on the conservation side.

But with the fall of the Thackerays and the re-entry of the BJP-led government, the ex-CM and the present Deputy CM, Devendra Fadnavis announced the relocation of the metro car shed back to Aarey. This has led to the resurrection of #SaveAarey protests, a citizen-led movement aimed at protecting the 32,000-acre Aarey Colony forests, a sensitive ecology home to various endangered plant and animal species, including leopards and around 27 tribal hamlets.

I was recently in Mumbai and to be frank, I love the city. It has an unforgettable welcoming charm to it. Though I have been living in Delhi-NCR for quite a while now, Mumbai does feel like a dreamy destination. However, I couldn’t help but notice the two things that the city is in a grave shortage of, trees and transportation. Apart from a few areas in the city, the foliage seems like a luxury and so does a safe public transportation system. The city’s traffic is slow and prone to traffic and therefore, the best way to get around it for tourists like me and millions of others is the famed Mumbai Local.

I was hoping to catch a local from Dadar to Chembur at 7:30 in the evening, it was a bad idea. Crowded or congested would be an understatement for the Local in front of me. Passengers clung onto the edges of the train, nearly a foot out of the local’s door, while the station itself was filled to its brim, so much so that people chose to hop on from one station to another on tracks while avoiding the jampacked foot-over bridges. I have been swarmed by a tsunami of people in the Delhi Metro’s Blue line and at Rajiv Chowk during the most crowded hours but nothing beats the colossal overload that Mumbai Local has to face daily.

The Mumbai Local network, by all means, is at the peak of its efficiency. This can be gauged by the fact that though a single 12-car local is authorised to carry 1174 passengers, these trains carry up to 6000 people at a typical peak hour. The Locals have an average waiting time of three minutes and as per Western Railways, the punctuality of the system was over 99% in 2021. However, this consistency just isn’t enough. An RTI in 2015 revealed that over 25,000 people fell out of overcrowded locals since 2005, out of these nearly 7,000 had died following the fall. On average, the city sees around seven to eight deaths due to overcrowded locals daily. And pretty much no one can forget the heart-wrenching stampede at Prabhadevi station in 2017.

Yes, the construction of the metro car shed in Aarey will result in the cutting down of trees and will certainly threaten the sensitive ecology of the area. But in this debate of environment vs development, we also need to think about the lives of millions of passengers on the overcrowded Mumbai Locals that are forced to play with their lives every day just to make ends meet. Dissent and disagreements have been a part of major infrastructure projects worldwide, but is hindering the growth of such projects, the way forward? From the Delhi Metro to the London Underground, and the New York Subway all these systems which today manage to keep thousands, if not millions of cars off the streets were once protested against. As per the Japan International Cooperation Association, the Delhi Metro alone has been able to take 1.2 lakh cars off the Delhi roads, thereby saving 6.3 lakh tonnes of CO2 ­emissions annually.  

Our future generations deserve fresh air and a clean environment, they deserve trees and forests but they also deserve safe public transportation. Instead of no development at all, isn’t sustainable development a better way? Saving our environment is our duty as citizens and a metro system is a step exactly towards that goal. We can romanticise the Mumbai Local all we want but in reality, it is crushingly overloaded with the hopes and dreams of nearly 80 lakh Mumbaikars, daily.

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)

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