The ambitious Mumbai coastal road project proposing to connect south Mumbai to Kandivali in the north of the city is set to get green approval. Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar, after a meeting with Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Thursday, said that the process will be completed soon.
The nearly 34 km-long coastal road project, to be built at an estimated cost of Rs 12,000 crore, was pending for clearance since the past five years. “ We have decided that within a week we will give it approval and the process will be completed”, said Javadekar after the meeting.
He also said that the issue of Mumbai Trans-Harbour link (MTHl) will be taken up in the upcoming Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) meeting. It was also decided to grant approvalon the sewage treatment plant which has to be set up in Mumbai. A total of 13 proposals were discussed in the meeting. it will take around ten days for the notification to come out. This is one of the important decisions, said the Minister.
Meanwhile, the project had earlier met with lot of protests largely from the fishing community and green activists for various reasons.
A number of fishing villages and organizations across the country had protested against the proposed project. For them, the primary reason behind their protest was that the road interfered with landing of boats thereby affecting the livelihood of their community fishermen. They claimed that the road will destroy the breeding grounds of fish as the accompanying mangrove forests will be cleared during the making of the road.
Certain experts argued that the suburban railway network of Mumbai carried around eight million people every day. The coastal road is expected to carry three lakh passengers per day. Hence, how can spending Rs. 13,000 crore on the proposed project but not even Rs 1000 crore on railways be justifiedIJ” they questioned.