SPOTLIGHT
On a wing and a prayer
SIDDHESH INAMDAR
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The approval given to the Navi Mumbai airport project highlights the failure of the legal framework governing coastal rules.
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In the last 18 years, the law was amended 25 times to clear development projects...
Photos: Siddhesh Inamdar
Still hanging in there: The village of Chinchpada, which will be wiped out if the Gadhi is diverted as planned.
Ramdas Gavand leans over the bridge and tries to tell which way the river will turn. The Gadhi gurgling under his feet is not Navi Mumbai’s Kosi; she is not known to change course at will every few years. Yet Gavand is sure that she is soon goi
ng to sweep his village away.
The Maharashtra government has chosen a 1140-hectare area (that includes 150 hectares of mangroves and 340 hectares of coastal marshy land) to build the Navi Mumbai International Airport. The Ulve and Gadhi rivers, which flow through this site and meet the Panvel creek a little distance ahead, will have to move over for the airport to take off.
Unfulfilled promises
In the process, 10 villages with a combined population of 50,000 will be shifted elsewhere. Villagers say that a rehabilitation site has been identified, but their concern is greater. “We don’t trust the CIDCO (City and Industrial Development Corporation),” says Gavand. “It has cheated us over four decades.”
In the 1960s, the government realised that the mainland east of Mumbai would attract huge population in future when the metropolis got saturated. The government, therefore, notified 18,824 hectares of land covering 95 villages for acquisition and development by CIDCO.
“We were paid just Rs. 36,500 per hectare,” says Pralhad Keni, a member of the Vadghar Gram Panschayat. “CIDCO officials told us that we would be given 12.5 per cent of the land that we had lost. That hasn’t happened till date.” Similarly, CIDCO never fulfilled its promise of providing jobs to the locals either.
No alternative?
Vivekanand Patil, the Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) from Panvel, says that he would oppose the airport even if the villagers are rehabilitated. “Airports are constructed away from urban areas,” he says. “But this site has urban settlements like Panvel and Kharghar on all sides. The air pollution will affect people’s health.”
Despite suggestions to move the project elsewhere, CIDCO maintains that the site was finalised after a decade of studies. A source close to Patil says that the real reason why the government is unwilling to budge is the Reliance Special Economic Zone (SEZ) that is going to come up in the region.
Environmental impact
Patil adds that the biggest problem that the airport will create is that of flooding. “The site is marshland and accommodates excess rainwater,” he says. “After the airport is built, if there is a repeat of the heavy rainfall of July 26, 2005, the whole area will be under water.”
Citing similar ecological reasons, and emphasising that the site was home to mangroves, the Union Minister of Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh refused to clear the project in June and asked the State government to look for an alternate site. However, he later had to approve it as the Civil Aviation Ministry and even the Prime Minister’s Office had cleared it.
Toothless coastal rules
What really turned the tide in CIDCO’s favour was an amendment in May made to the only law that stood in the way of the project’s implementation — the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) notification. Under this, the site falls within Zone I, a no-development zone, which is the stretch up to 500 metres from the high-tide line. In order to clear this hurdle, an exception was made exclusively for the airport.
“This,” says Manju Menon, a member of a Pune-based organisation, Kalpavriksh, “is in keeping with what has happened ever since the CRZ came into being in 1991.” In the last 18 years, the law was amended 25 times to clear development projects “stuck up” due to environmental reasons.
In Mumbai itself, the Bandra-Worli Sea Link project was similarly cleared after amending the CRZ notification in 1997. In a scholarly paper she wrote for the Economic and Political Weekly (September 22, 2007), Menon observed: “The run-in period of the CRZ notification synchronised with India’s economic reforms, and this had a big influence on the implementation of its original objective.”
To address these loopholes, the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) came out with a new Coastal Management Zone (CMZ) notification in 2008. Ironically, activists say, this is much weaker than even the CRZ.
It proposed a new system that allowed development projects in hitherto no-development zones as long as an Integrated Coastal Zone Management Plan supervised them. It also sought to regularise CRZ violations by proposing that 2008 be made the cut-off year for the approval of development projects.
The way ahead
There are no specific safeguards in the CMZ against the exploitation of fishermen’s traditional rights. Due to widespread objections by the fishing community, Jairam Ramesh announced on July 17 that he would allow the CMZ to lapse.
“He told us that five consultations would be held with fishermen across India before August 31, and the new rules would accommodate our viewpoints,” says T. Peter, Secretary of the National Fishworkers’ Forum. In addition, the MoEF has also announced that it would consider a separate Fisherman Rights Act.
What is really needed, says Menon, “is the proper implementation of the CRZ itself without any dilution” — like the one set to change the course of two rivers, and of thousands of lives settled around them, forever.
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