This year, as the monsoons unleashed severe flooding in South Mumbai, we were presented with standard narratives of the disaster. The bureaucracy blamed the high-intensity rainfall and outdated infrastructure; the people blamed it on a lack of political will and an absence of planning.
After the devastating 2005 floods in Mumbai, the Madhav Chitale Committee report pointed out that even if the entire system had been upgraded as per its new stormwater drainage project or BRIMSTOWAD, it would not have been adequate for the rainfall of such high intensity. BRIMSTOWAD was designed to deal with normal occasions of rainfall, not high intensity rainfall events.
The Chitale report came out 14 years ago. Since then, extreme rainfall events have become more frequent. Meanwhile, natural water courses are being filled up and diverted (disrupting drainage patterns), permeable areas are being paved and built upon (increasing run-off), coastal areas are being reclaimed to create new land (displacing water elsewhere).
Mumbai is drowning because its land is being made more impermeable, ecological systems are being built upon, and extreme weather events are becoming normal. Yet, instead of examining the relations between coastal communities and delicate ecosystems, Mumbai’s planners are looking for ways to make more land.
The proposal to build a land-filled 9.8-kilometre Coastal Road along the western shoreline has attracted strong criticism: from public transport advocates, who decry the neglect of overburdened public transport infrastructure; environmentalists, who scorn the authorities’ ignorance of a fragile coastal ecology; residents, who worry about the traffic mayhem it will create in their neighborhoods; and from the artisanal fisherfolk, who point out that the project will decimate their traditional shallow water fishing grounds and coastal commons.
The city government and highway builders have circumvented coastal protection regulations, evaded democratic process, skirted public debate, and outmaneuvered legal opposition to continue reclaiming the coast exclusively for motorists and developers. Already, a significant amount of work mainly land-filling has been completed, without requisite environmental and wildlife clearance.
Although slowed by the flight of construction workers due to Mumbai’s poor handling of the coronavirus pandemic, work on the project continued even during the total lockdown in the months of April and May the municipal corporation claimed that the reclamation was essential pre-monsoon work. Curiously, the city’s stormwater system did not get such attention.
And so, even as Mumbai sees the number of Covid-19 cases rise, with tens of thousands needing food and healthcare, frontline workers lacking safety equipment, and health infrastructure unable to cope, the government continues to invest in a project that will serve no more than 0.54% of its daily commuter trips.
It is revealing that the Mumbai municipal corporation hired consultants to prepare both the project and implementation plans as well as the social and environmental impact assessment studies of their own plans a practice that is inevitably prone to a whole range of evaluation biases.
For instance, in the Social Impact Assessment for the project, there was neither an acknowledgement of the existence of the traditional fishing zones, or of the customary use of the nearshore and foreshore areas for artisanal fishing activity.
For artisanal fisherfolk, the coast is a productive landscape the intricate fabric of economic, social and cultural life, rooted in the interface between land and water. The health of the ecology of these shallow coastal waters are thus critical to the livelihoods of the artisanal fishers, who have adopted methods of fishing suited to various ecological and geomorphic conditions of the coast; their customary practices ensure the preservation of coastal biodiversity.
The fisherfolk follow distinctive social arrangements of apportioning these marine and intertidal commons – areas that are now being snatched away from them for coastal real-estate. Land-filling for the Coastal Road will decimate the coastal ecology of the intertidal and shallow waters and the livelihoods of the artisanal fisherfolk.
Reclamation for the Coastal Road, is thus ocean grabbing defined as capturing of control by powerful economic actors of crucial decision-making around fisheries. It involves the violation of economic, social and cultural rights of coastal communities, especially small fishers, that depend on the sea for livelihood. The project will lead to the dispossession of the artisanal fishers, and appropriation of the use, control and access to the fishing waters and marine resources from its existing users and right-holders.