I visited Mumbai to spend a couple of days with my great-aunt, who lives with her daughter’s family in a suburb. Suburbs, according to a typical joke in urban planning, are places where street names bear the names of trees that were cut down en masse to make way for the development.
The Mumbai suburb that I went to, Mulund, has names of trees that are not even native to the local geography. The name of a multi-storied housing complex is “Silver Birch” and, oddly enough, there are quite a few other complexes in the same neighborhood with names such as “Pinewood” and “Silver Oaks.”
Of considerably more importance than names of alien tree species is how these residential complexes reflect a critical tension between urbanization and green space.
The geographic expansion into the suburbs has meant a slow encroachment on forest areas and the hills that surround Mumbai. Mulund is a poster-child for this encroachment. Loss of trees and green space has become a heated public policy issue here, and elsewhere. Finally!
As viewers of the Oscar-winning “Slumdog Millionaire” might recall, Mumbai is a huge metropolis with a population of more than 13 million — though it feels as if there are a hundred times more. The housing needs, as one might imagine, are immense, as was evident in the same movie, which is also why middle- and upper-middle classes commute for hours from distant suburbs.
Suburbanization has resulted in significant loss of green space. It is not that the government or the people were unconcerned; when a government is resource-starved, and with hundreds of thousands clamoring to find a place of their own, it was easier for everyone to be in denial. Or, a policy of benign neglect, as we sometimes refer to such practices in the profession.
But when urban forests have been replaced by concrete buildings that seem to be taller and wider than the redwood trees after which at least one building is named, benign neglect cannot continue forever.
Thanks to the work of environmentalists and the government, too, it appears that large-scale destruction of forests has been slowed down, if not completely halted. These efforts are also reflected in the manner in which metropolitan areas now review land development proposals. To such an extent that it was feared that the government would swing a wrecking ball to demolish all structures that compromised urban green spaces. Such a retroactive decision would, obviously, add to the chaos that characterizes life in India.
The courts have taken a rational view in their recent decision to regularize all developments constructed before 2005. The status of more recent constructions is not quite clear, however.
This competition between nature and humans is not merely in the metropolitan area of Mumbai. It is a story that is repeated in many ways all over the country. According to India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests, “Due to the impact of biotic pressure on our forests, many forest areas spread across the country have been depleted and degraded, which is a serious concern.”
Recent incidents are telling: A couple of hundred miles away from Mumbai, in the forest areas, villagers stoned a leopard to death, even while forest officials stood by. And the story gets even worse — it was the third such leopard-stoning in the country within a matter of days. The villagers pelted the big cat because it had strayed into the village searching for food and water and, in the process, attacked a couple of youngsters.
Also in the news a few days ago was a story about the absence of tigers in one of India’s tiger parks — Panna National Park — which is in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Apparently it was not the first occurrence in India — tigers have yet to be spotted in another reserve in the same state, and in a third protected area in the state of Rajasthan, which is in northwestern India.
It is clear that the flora and fauna will continue to face intense competition from humans in villages and cities alike. I hope that Mumbaikars and other Indians, too, will soon figure out how to peacefully coexist with nature, as much as we in Oregon — with “real” birches and oaks — have, by and large, worked out. We ought to thank pioneering visionaries like Gov. Tom McCall for that.
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