Overview

• On August 1, the Supreme Court bench of Chief Justice B R Gavai and Justice K Vinod Chandran paused the Bombay High Court’s May 2 order restoring 119.91 hectares at Kanjurmarg as protected forest.
• BMC’s special leave petition asserts that a July 2008 notification wrongly classified parts of the landfill as forest and that there is no viable alternative site for nearly 90% of Mumbai’s daily 6,000+ tonnes of waste.
• Senior civic officials plan to install a 60 MW waste-to-energy plant and a 500 TPD wet waste facility at Kanjurmarg, aiming to generate about 16 tonnes of compressed biogas per day.
• Environmental activists and local residents decry the stay as environmental injustice, citing health problems such as asthma, coughing and skin diseases from ongoing dumping.
• The apex court will now review the BMC’s land-notification challenge, with its final ruling set to determine the balance between ecological restoration and Mumbai’s sanitation needs.