In the vicinity of the Mulund dumping ground, residents breathe a sigh of relief: they look forward to open green spaces to replace the 60 acres of polluting garbage they have endured for decades. Although the Mulund dump was closed in 2018, it has taken four years for the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) to begin excavating the six million tonnes of garbage, which has piled up there since 1967. Meanwhile, residents have continued to suffer its adverse health effects.
Mumbai needs both: the Mahalaxmi racecourse and the open green space in place of the garbage dump at Mulund – a ‘move’ which would create one green area at the cost of another would adversely impact the environment of the whole city. Such a ‘move’ would worsen the already serious effects of the climate crisis Mumbai faces.
Mumbai is a member of the world’s Climate-40 cities and has pledged to align policy and its implementation to climate-friendly measures. Mumbai recognises the seriousness of the climate crisis and was the first Indian city to launch a plan to address this crisis through the Mumbai Climate Action Plan (MCAP). In the long-term interests of all residents, it is imperative to implement MCAP’s recommendations simultaneously across the city, to the benefit of us all.
In space-starved Mumbai, open green spaces are amongst the lowest in the world. The MCAP says, “The city lost 43% of its green cover in three decades since the 1980s and currently has a per capita accessible open space of 1.08 sqm/person, much lower than the Urban and Regional Development Plans Formulation and Implementation (URDPFI) guideline of 10-12 sqm/person for Indian cities.”
Mumbai has also recognised the urgent need for “urban greening and biodiversity” as priority in the Mumbai Climate Action Plan. Other priorities of the MCAP include “Air Quality” “Urban Flooding and Water Resource Management”.
To fulfill these priority areas, and recognising the paucity of land, the BMC has mandated planting urban forests in the Miyawaki style on all available open spaces. The Miyawaki style of planting uses local plant species and results in a forest of trees planted very close together for maximum carbon sequestration in very small spaces.
However, studies have found that grasslands are even more efficient at carbon sequestration than forests. Additionally, they act as water sinks and absorb ground water, in turn reducing flooding, recharging ground water and fulfilling other key priorities of the MCAP.
The BMC has recognised that Mumbai is at serious risk of being underwater by 2050. The grassy areas of the racecourse at Mumbai are an important measure to mitigate the worst effects of ever-increasing possibility of flooding and to mitigate the ‘heat island effect’ which Mumbai has witnessed over the past decades.
The 225 acres of the Mahalaxmi Racecourse were built on marshy flatlands in 1883 and currently contribute to south Mumbai’s miniscule percentage of open spaces. The grounds include grasslands, trees, private and public recreational space.
“Such a valuable area cannot be ‘moved’ elsewhere or replaced by theme parks or other types of development involving cement-concrete,” says Nayana Kathpalia, a Trustee of the OVAL Trust. “It is extremely rewarding for us to witness the results of our work to restore and maintain the Oval over the decades in the thousands of people who congregate every weekend and holiday to play. They come from all over the city to use the ground and they are a living testimony to the importance of open spaces.”
The open green spaces of south Mumbai are even lower than those of Mumbai’s western and eastern suburbs where Mulind is situated (which contain the Sanjay Gandhi National Park and the Aarey Forest).
Mumbai needs all its available open spaces. The Mahalaxmi racecourse cannot be moved to any other part of the city. The environmental services provided by its 225 acres of open space cannot be accommodated in the much smaller area of Mulund’s 60 acres. Such a ‘move’ would drastically reduce overall open spaces of Mumbai by hundreds of acres and would be against our international climate pledges.
We need both, the Mahalaxmi racecourse’s 225 acres and the Mulund
dumping ground’s 60 acres as public open spaces. Each one is valuable and is irreplaceable.