Can the "Lungs of Bombay" be given space to breathe?

Called upon to plant trees, Mumbaikars join the historic fight to preserve Sanjay Gandhi National Park.

Sara Stefanini November 11, 2009 06:49Updated May 30, 2010 12:12

A female white tiger cub called "Rashmi" plays at Sanjay Gandhi national park in Bombay, May 17, 2005. (Adeel Halim/Reuters)

MUMBAI, India — For a long time, the leopards of Mumbai's Sanjay Gandhi National Park faced not only poachers, but also encroachment by some 165,000 slum-dwellers as India's bustling financial capital spilled over into the endangered forest's borders.

The battle to conserve the park, which is one of the only national parks in the world located inside a city’s borders, has raged for years. It has landed several times before the Mumbai High Court, but court orders have brought few effective responses.

Taking a new approach, a local non-profit is appealing directly to the city’s residents, in the hopes that they will apply the pressure necessary to yield changes from the government. By inviting people to help plant 50,000 new trees and shrubs on a degraded piece of Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Gaia Conservation Foundation, a group started by three 20-something Mumbaikars, hopes that more city dwellers will be inspired to enjoy, and, more importantly, fight for their green space.

“The cumulative benefit of the park is huge, but people just don’t know about it,” said Agastya Chopra, a Gaia co-founder.

Tree planting schemes are neither high-tech nor innovative, but may receive renewed attention when December's Copenhagen Climate Change Conference discusses schemes to pay developing countries to restore their forests and reduce emissions from deforestation.

In a sign that it is boosting efforts to slow deforestation, India announced in September that it had more than doubled the forestry budget to $1.79 billion to promote tree-planting and strengthen its forestry departments. A fifth of the subcontinent is covered in woodlands, and city parks are deemed crucial to air quality.

In Mumbai, a city of almost 20 million hemmed in by water on three sides, the protection of Sanjay Gandhi National Park, a forest often nicknamed “The Lungs of Bombay,” has historically butted up against the need for space.

The 104-square-kilometer park, which takes up nearly a fourth of the city, houses two lakes that provide a bulk of Mumbai’s water supply, as well as a population of leopards that has dwindled to between 10 and 20, and hundreds of different birds and plants.

“The park is like an oxygen factory for Bombay,” said Debi Goenka, leader of the non-profit Conservation Action Trust (CAT), which sued the state government in 1995 for failing to protect the park.

At the time, slumlords typically leased government-protected parkland to slum-dwellers and paid police to look the other way, CAT claimed. When the group sued, it found some 33,000 slum structures, each housing about five people, behind forest boundaries.