MUMBAI: Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis on Wednesday cleared the Gargai water supply project inside the Tansa wildlife sanctuary for Mumbai’s increasing water needs. The step will involve environmental consequences: apart from the chopping of hundreds of thousands of trees, nearly 658 hectares of forest land in the sanctuary as well as 186 hectares of private land will be submerged. The forest department representatives present at the meeting at Vidhan Bhavan objected to the project, but their protests were shot down.
The Uddhav Thackeray government had stayed the Gargai project, since it involved the chopping of so many trees, and proposed a water desalination project at Malvani instead. As per an old survey, more than 2,50,000 trees were to be cut then. The forest department is now doing a fresh survey, and the BMC has paid for this.
Mumbai gets over 4,000 million litres of water per day (MLD) from the seven lakes of Tulsi, Vihar, Tansa, Modak Sagar, Bhatsa, Middle Vaitarna and Upper Vaitarna. Nearly 30% of this is wasted on account of thefts and leakages. Most water supply projects were completed by the British, and the last one, the Middle Vaitarna project, was completed in 2014 by the BMC by cutting over 700,000 trees.
Gargai will add another 400 MLD to Mumbai’s water supply. Forest officials at the meeting were opposed to the idea, but the others, including Fadnavis and BMC officers, said that Mumbai would face a severe water shortage in the next five years, as the population was increasing and many old buildings were being redeveloped. Forest minister Ganesh Naik, municipal commissioner Bhushan Gagrani, additional chief secretary (forests) Milind Mhaiskar and others attended the meeting.
Sources in the government said that Uddhav Thackeray, who is a wildlife enthusiast, wanted to save the forest and had asked the Mahayuti government to go in for desalination instead. The government went slow on the desalination plant, but has cleared it now along with the Gargai project.
The CM also cleared a new water treatment plant at Bhandup to purify 2,000 MLD of water; this will replace an old plant which purifies 1,910 MLD. The Bhandup water treatment complex owned by the BMC falls under the eco-sensitive zone of Sanjay Gandhi National Park, and the replacement of the old plant will mean cutting down 800-plus trees. Members of the forest department’s eco-sensitive zone monitoring committee had opposed this, but their objections too were overruled.
Shiv Sena UBT MLA Aaditya Thackeray said, “In the initial years, we were keen on the Gargai and Pinjal water supply projects. But we realised in 2016-2018 that 350,000 trees would have to be cut for the dam—actually 600,000 if the water body creation and pipes were taken into account. The cost of the dam will be ₹15,000 crore to ₹20,000 crore. As against this, the desalination project would have cost ₹1,500 crore for 450 MLD of water.”
