SC Allows Construction in Mumbai’s Aarey Green Belt
A total of 407 acres in the green Aarey Colony in suburban Mumbai, can now be used for infrastructure and building construction projects. The SC bench of Justices Arun Mishra and Abdul Nazeer, however, observed that Mumbai was “a congested city” and Metro was important, and dismissed the NGO’s appeal. In a setback to city environmentalists, the Supreme Court dismissed an appeal by NGO Vanashakti and its director Stalin Dayanand against an order of the National Green Tribunal (NGT). In January, the tribunal had upheld a 2016 order of the ministry of environment, forest and climate change (MoEF) to exclude 407 acres of over 15,000 acres notified as an Ecologically Sensitive Zone (ESZ) around the Sanjay Gandhi National Park. The environment ministry, while justifying the reduced ESZ, had informed the NGT that the state government had proposed the Metro rail shed in the excluded Aarey land and some slums and high-rises exist on the boundary with Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP). The NGO said allowing construction inside an ESZ will cause “irreparable harm to the highly sensitive ecology of the region which harbours 1,300 species of flowering plants, 45 species of mammals, 43 species of reptiles, 300 species of birds and 150 species of butterflies” and “thereby impact the entire biodiversity of the park”. Among the major projects planned within the exempted 407 acres in Aarey is a slum redevelopment project spread over 90 acres, which will hold 80,000 people.
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