A 3.2-acre plot in Marol has 150 trees and a pile of debris. It is also, if things go to plan, the beginning of something this city should have started a generation ago.
There is a certain cruelty to the location, and also a certain logic. Marol, in Andheri East, is one of the hottest, most concrete-saturated pockets in an already blazing megacity. After Metro Line 1 was constructed through the area, land surface temperatures climbed from a recorded average of 29.27°C in 2005 to a punishing 38.8°C in subsequent years. The K East Ward, which houses the Marol Cooperative Industrial Estate, has the lowest tree cover of any ward in Mumbai. It was, in the plain language of the Mumbai Climate Action Plan, a textbook urban heat island. It is, in the plain language of anyone who has walked through it in May, just very hot.
And yet, sitting along the Mithi River in Marol, there is a 12,964-square-metre plot, formally reserved as a recreation ground under ROS 1.4 of the Development Plan, that has spent years doing almost nothing. It has around 150 trees on it. It has debris. It has the quiet, slightly defeated quality of public land in Mumbai that the system has designated for one purpose and delivered for no purpose at all.
The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation now plans to change that. According to a report in a leading Mumbai daily, the plot is to be developed into what is being described as Mumbai’s first public urban forest, a nature interactive centre combining ecological restoration with public amenities for all age groups. The project is being implemented by Green Yatra, an NGO founded by Pradeep Tripathi, through corporate social responsibility funding. The envisioned features, as reported by a leading Mumbai daily, include a Miyawaki forest patch, bird habitat zones, a bamboo arboretum, native grasslands, butterfly gardens, sacred groves, and medicinal plant zones. Public amenities will include natural walking pathways, children’s play areas, lawns, open-air fitness zones, senior citizen seating, and a dedicated toddler zone for children below two years of age.
A leading Mumbai daily reported that Deputy Municipal Commissioner Vishwas Mote described such initiatives as urgently necessary in the context of climate change, noting that the park would benefit both the environment and local residents through its range of public amenities. Local MLA Murji Patel, the report noted, had recently written to the BMC pointing out that the land existed but remained unusable for residents in his constituency, formally requesting that it be developed into accessible public space.
Work has begun. But the forest is not yet open, and the timeline carries its own honesty. The report noted that Green Yatra’s founder acknowledged a substantial amount of debris needing clearance before plantation can begin in earnest, and that the trees would need to grow to a sufficient height before the space could safely be opened to the public. These are the unglamorous realities of ecological restoration in a city that has been producing debris for decades and growing trees for almost none of that time.
What Took So Long
That question deserves a real answer, not a rhetorical one.
The BMC is one of the wealthiest municipal corporations in Asia, with annual budgets that routinely cross Rs. 50,000 crore. It has not, however, spent those resources as a city serious about its ecological future would. The Gokhale Bridge in Andheri, a busy road overbridge that the BMC had audited and flagged as structurally weak, collapsed in July 2018, killing two people. Portions of a foot overbridge near the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus fell in March 2019, killing several commuters. These were not acts of nature. They were the consequence of chronic inspection failure and deferred maintenance inside a corporation that had the money and lacked the institutional discipline. The Mithi River, which runs directly alongside this proposed forest site, flooded catastrophically in July 2005, killing over 400 people and paralysing the city for days. Subsequent inquiries recommended green buffer zones along the river’s banks. Those recommendations were largely ignored for the better part of two decades.
I have covered the BMC long enough to know how this works. A committee recommends something sensible, a report gets filed, the press covers it for a week, and then the file finds its way to a shelf where it ages quietly alongside all the other sensible recommendations nobody acted on. The planning history of this very plot makes the point neatly. The leading Mumbai daily reported that the K East Ward’s assistant municipal commissioner confirmed the plot had earlier been proposed for inclusion in Phase 2 of the city’s urban forest project, but that this did not materialise. The CSR funding route was then explored as an alternative. So a piece of public land reserved for public recreation under the Development Plan, sitting in the most tree-deficient ward in Mumbai, required multiple failed attempts at official funding before an NGO with corporate money was brought in to finally make something happen. That is not a success story dressed up as one. It is the BMC stumbling towards the right answer by a process of elimination.
The deeper failure has always been one of imagination. Every iteration of Mumbai’s Development Plan has been shaped by the same gravitational pull: land as commodity, FSI as reward, density as inevitability. The idea that a vacant plot could be planted up and allowed to become a forest felt, within this ecosystem of incentives, like leaving money on the table. The Garden Department, which would manage such spaces, has historically been among the more underfunded and overlooked arms of the municipal structure. In January 2020, a Miyawaki-technique forest was planted at Bhakti Park in Wadala, with 57,000 trees established on a compact plot. It was a genuine effort. But it remained a single initiative rather than the opening move of a coherent policy, and no systematic ward-level replication followed. The search for suitable plots continued at the quiet pace of things that have no political deadline.
What Other Cities Did, and When
Mexico City declared the Bosque de Chapultepec a public park in 1530. That is not a typographical error. In the year 1530, just nine years after the Spanish Conquest, colonial administrators designated Chapultepec Forest as an open public space. Today it spans over 866 hectares in the heart of the city, drawing more than 20 million visitors a year. It houses nine museums, a zoo, lakes, and one of the most visited national anthropology collections in the world. Rehabilitation efforts between 2005 and 2010 were funded through a combination of government allocations and private civic groups. In 2019, the Mexican government converted a former military base of 100 acres into an expansion of the same forest. The civic culture around Chapultepec runs deep enough that an independent civil society organisation, the Friends of Chapultepec Forest, has raised private funds for its restoration over many years.
In Rio de Janeiro, the Tijuca Forest covers over 32 square kilometres within the city limits. It began as a restoration policy in 1844, when the Brazilian government replanted hillside areas cleared for sugar and coffee cultivation. Declared a national park in 1961 and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, its conservation has been funded through Brazil’s federal government via the Chico Mendes Institute of Conservation and Biodiversity. What strikes you, reading the Tijuca history, is not the scale of it but the patience. A government decided in 1844 that the land mattered more than what could be extracted from it, and then actually held to that position across generations. That quality of institutional patience is not something Mumbai’s civic history has ever really demonstrated.
Singapore’s transformation is different in character but no less deliberate. Beginning in the 1960s under Lee Kuan Yew’s government, the National Parks Board institutionalised greenery into urban planning law as a matter of state policy, not municipal discretion. The result, sustained over six decades of government capital and institutional rigour, produced a city where green cover is a legally protected datum rather than an aspiration.
New York’s story is instructive in a different way. The MillionTreesNYC campaign, launched in 2007, was a public-private partnership combining city budget allocations, corporate CSR funding, and organised volunteer planting drives. A disused elevated freight railway on Manhattan’s West Side was converted into the High Line, a publicly accessible green corridor running nearly 2.5 kilometres. It is not strictly an urban forest. It is a planted walkway with grasses, shrubs and small trees. But it belongs in this conversation because it was community-led in its origins, pushed by neighbourhood residents and advocacy groups before city government gave it formal backing. The distinction between a forest and a corridor is real, but the underlying civic logic is identical: urban land can be greened, and when it is, people use it, value it, and defend it.
The funding models differed. Singapore used the state. Rio used conservation law and federal money. New York layered philanthropy over public budgets. Mexico City drew on government and organised civic groups across literal centuries. What none of them required was a unique model. What all of them required was a political class that decided green public space was a right rather than a luxury, and a citizenry that made that demand loudly enough to be heard.
The Civic Demand Question
This is where the conversation gets uncomfortable, and it should.
Were populations in these foreign cities simply more evolved as civic actors? Did they demand green spaces because they had the education, the income security, and the civic vocabulary to make those demands effectively? And does the long absence of such pressure in Mumbai reflect something about where Indian urban populations are in that process?
The honest answer is layered. Walk through Shivaji Nagar in Govandi on a May afternoon, when the temperature sits above 40°C and the nearest patch of shade is a construction hoarding, and the question of why residents there have not organised around canopy cover answers itself fairly quickly. A large section of Mumbai’s population has always been navigating something more immediate. Rent. Commute costs. School admissions. Water supply schedules. The daily arithmetic of survival in a megacity of twenty million does not automatically leave bandwidth for sustained advocacy around biodiversity corridors. Working-class Mumbaikars are not indifferent to green space. They use the few parks that exist intensively and gratefully, the evening crowds at Shivaji Park and the weekend press at Sanjay Gandhi National Park’s entry gates make that plain enough. But organising around those spaces, holding a municipal corporation accountable across election cycles, building the civic infrastructure that produces durable change, all of that requires a degree of material stability that many Mumbai residents are still working towards.
And yet, stopping the argument there would be too convenient. Mumbai has a large, educated, and vocally opinionated middle class that has spent decades organising effectively around flyover access, property rights, and school admissions. It has not organised with comparable intensity around urban forests, river buffer zones, or ecological planning. That is a choice, even if it is not always a conscious one. The civic hierarchy of priorities has simply not placed the natural environment high enough for long enough.
What Must Actually Happen Now
The Marol project is a beginning, not a benchmark. The debris still needs clearing. The trees need time to grow. The space needs to be maintained after it opens, which is where Mumbai’s public green infrastructure has historically struggled most. A Miyawaki patch planted without sustained maintenance becomes a maintenance problem within three monsoons.
The scepticism is warranted because the history demands it. Mumbai’s planning record is full of proposals that moved from announcement to implementation to quiet neglect. The BMC’s Garden Department is under-resourced relative to the scale of what is now being asked of it. Political attention is a renewable but unreliable resource in this city, and anyone who has watched enough budget cycles here knows that today’s priority has a way of becoming next year’s footnote.
The question is not whether the Marol urban forest is a good idea. It is obviously and urgently one. The question is whether the BMC will treat it as the opening move of a city-wide green policy, replicate the model in every heat-stressed ward, and fund maintenance as seriously as it funds inauguration.
Mexico City sorted this out in 1530. Mumbai is clearing debris in 2026. The land exists, the science is unambiguous, the NGO is on site, and the CSR funding is in place. What has always been missing was never the money or the land or even the will of individual officials. It was the institutional decision to finally act as though the city belonged to everyone who lived in it, including those who simply needed somewhere green to breathe.
Subscribe Deshwale on YouTube
