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Urban Riparian Metamorphosis, Mumbai Rivers

Namrata Toraskar
Dec 5, 2015
2 min read

A city full of paradoxes, Mumbai is a microcosm of India in many ways. One minor part of her is decisively pulling her towards the path marked 'Destruction through development- DEVILopment while a major part of her wants to take the path of 'Sustainable Development' but cannot do so since it is chained to bureaucracy and politics.

The surmise here cannot be that Mumbai is deprived of natural beauty and has no scope for creating open and public spaces for its teeming citizens. Just look at its natural endowments a scenic ocean on all three sides, the world's largest natural park within the limits of a city, ancient caves in the vicinity, beaches, bays, creeks, lakes, and, let's not forget, the rivers flowing through the middle of the city. Sadly, it is the river that has become a sewer.

The floods brought Mumbai’s rivers into prominence. In the normal course of events, the rivers would have served as effective storm-water drains, channeling the floodwaters swiftly into the sea at a pace that cannot be matched by any manmade construction. But Mumbai’s obsession with concrete has not spared even the rivers. They have been encroached upon, their natural course has been forcibly altered by the construction of roads and retaining walls, and they are used as sewers and as a dumping ground for debris. Their natural capacity as a disaster-prevention system has been disabled. The rivers are themselves, ironically, disasters in the making. They are Mumbai’s most abused ecological feature.

To most people it comes as a surprise that there are rivers in Mumbai. The city’s development plans and municipal authorities refer to them as nalas– literally small channels, but conveniently interpreted to mean open drains. And that is exactly how they are treated. Sluggish with raw sewage, chemical and other untreated waste, these rivers have been reduced to noxious quagmires.

In order to meliorate the living conditions along a urban river, it is imperative to restore back the river’s ecological health. This, however, is a Utopian dream and it shall take a long period of time for it to materialize. Also, exploring the wedding of ecological restoration and sustainable development in an urban riparian zone will force us to recognize that there are many different ways of viewing the conservation landscape along a river. The fact that ecological, cultural, historical, economic, and geographic differences are going to translate into distinct land ethics as well as various localized definitions, models, and strategies should be the basis for ecological restoration.