The train I take to work every day travels over the Vashi creek. The area surrounding the creek was once a marshy mangrove, but is now a bustling urban centre. A lot of people are moving into Navi Mumbai, just across the Vashi creek; and the marshland is being filled in ever more rapidly. The ecological implications of these changes are enormous, even to the untrained eye. But strangely, no one seems to be giving it much thought. I even read a news report after I came to Mumbai of the state environment minister saying the remaining mangroves should be cut down to make way for highrises!
My friends, who have been in this city far longer than I have been, tell me that only a few years back there was not one human being in the area. Pioneers here say stories of how hard daily life was in the early days of development, with taxis and even groceries hard to come by.
This transformation has set me thinking: who lived here once and were there wild animals in those ghats overlooking the coast? I still have no answers. But I guess there could have been people here; those that scrapped a living out of the meagre resources that nature offered, much like rural life in India in the early 1960s.
All those people could have been swept off by the fast-paced development. Many of those people would have become dependant on the new economy, after seeing their lands and the countryside which provided them sustenance, being snatched away from them.
It is a sad story, and our rulers are ensuring that it get repeated across the country, day after day. Naxalites and other radical elements may try to profit from this displacement and disempowerment but I don't think they can make any lasting transformation in the way things are going now. The forces of the market, fuelled by greed and selfishness, are too strong to be stopped on their tracks, let alone rolled back, by such radical movements.
So what next? I guess we are heading for a huge ecological disaster. I shudder to think of its dimensions and implications.
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