‘Navi Mumbai airport will endanger forests’

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Minister for environment and forests Jairam Ramesh has entered into a fresh round of confrontation with aviation minister Praful Patel.
Mr Patel had last week accused the MoEF minister of delaying the construction of the Navi Mumbai airport but Mr Ramesh has shot him a letter warning that its c

onstruction will involve decimating a 300-acre mangrove forests which protect the Navi Mumbai shoreline and the diversion of two rivers — the Gadh and Ulwe — which flow into the Panvel Creek.
The letter, dated July 3, emphasises that the Navi Mumbai airport “is not pending with the MoEF”.
Tracing the MoEF’s involvement with this issue, Mr Ramesh stated that his ministry received the proposal for developing a greenfield airport on June 27 2007 but the final amendment of the Coastal Regulatory Zone (CRZ) notification allowing for a mangrove forest to be converted into an airport was issued two years later on May 15, 2009.
While the ministry’s environment appraisal committee (EAC) undertook a site visit on December 23, 2009, the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB) submitted its report on the public hearings pertaining to the Navi Mumbai airport only on June 7, 2010. A fortnight later, on June 22, the MoEF wrote to both the Maharashtra Coastal Zone Management Authority (MCZMA) and City Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO) asking for their recommendations, as also their critiquing of the preliminary EIA report. The minister now needs to receive the “final EIA report” from CIDCO and MCZMA on the basis of which the EAC will then submit its own recommendations “to enable me to take an appropriate decision”.
More significantly, the letter highlighted, building the airport at the present selected site would require the levelling of a 80-metre-high hill which raises significant coastal zone management issues.
Environmentalists warn that the new airport would be vulnerable to high tides and sea storms even after land is reclaimed. “The safe height to which the ground level has to be raised is four metres but CIDCO will succeed in raising the level by just two-and-a-half to three metres. This would be risky as the potential height of sea waves is between three and 10 metres,” said an activist with the Conservation Action Trust.
Changing the course of the two rivers would be a blunder, said environmental lawyer Girish Raut. “The same mistake was made while constructing the Mumbai airport. The Mithi river was diverted at two points and led to Mumbai getting flooded in the floods in 2005 which led to a two-day shutdown of the airport,” said Mr Raut. Mumbai’s current Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport caters to 20 million passengers and will, even after expansion, only accommodate 40 million passengers a year. The proposed Navi Mumbai International Airport is expected to absorb a minimum of 10 million passengers within its first year.