Mumbai is being flattened
Mumbai’s hills are vanishing at an alarming pace. Whenever the city expands, its hills are the first to fall. Ever since a few hills were felled in order to fill the watery gaps between the city’s original seven islands, their destruction hasn’t stopped.
Navi Mumbai was created by flattening the foothills of the Kalwa-Belapur range 40 years ago. Recently, quarrying has further downsized the hills in the Thane-Belapur region. Large swathes of Powai have been flattened to make way for residential complexes and the ecology of Sanjay Gandhi national park is suffering because of quarrying outside its limits and buildings eating into the forest.
In fact the quarrying of hills is banned in Mumbai. But permissions are acquired under the pretext of constructing apartment blocks. The result of such assaults is landslides like the one that took place in Dindoshi last week. “The moment you cut vegetation, the binding force is gone,” explained Shyam Asolekar, a professor at IIT Bombay’s Centre for Environmental Science and Engineering. “Therefore every rain drop will erode top soil. There is a layer structure in a hill. The top layer is soil, the bottom is hard rock and there’s soft rock in between. To get hard rock (during quarrying) you’re going to set aside soil and soft rock. The moment you set it aside and you uncover rock you have no way to reconstruct the hill. So the hill as a feature of urban ecology is gone.”