Mahim beach once had a prominent shoreline, stretching from Mahim Fort to Mahim market. The shoreline has narrowed over the last decade owing to frantic reclamation, angering local residents, who have now got together to form a forum to save the beach from being reclaimed further.
On Monday, members forced the city collector’s office to stop work of building bunds around the 1-km stretch of beach. The anti-soil erosion bunds were being put up by Classic Construction, a contractor appointed by the state-run public works department (PWD).
While PWD officials claimed that the bunds were being put in place to curb the impact of soil erosion on buildings located along the shoreline, collector officials who inspected the site after the locals protested that the contractor did not possess the collector’s permission to carry out the work.
A collector official said that the contractor was carrying out work on the foreshore land, located between the land and the sea, for which he did not possess requisite permission.
The collector’s office instructed the PWD contractor to discontinue the work, and city collector IA Kundan has summoned PWD officials and the contractor for a hearing on Tuesday. Deepak Talwar, a local resident, said that even members on the forum have been asked to remain present for the hearing.
Member Rohit Katre told DNA that instead of creating bunds skirting the boundaries of existing buildings, these were being created leaving a 50 m gap from the buildings. Alleging that this was being done with the intention of reclaiming the enclosed portion of the beach, forum members suspect that this was being done to benefit a private developer.
“We won’t allow this to go on,” said another member, Santosh Yedve.
Sources in the collector’s office told DNA that the office would also check if similar work carried out on the shoreline from Nariman Point to Hinduja Hospital had the required permissions.
Environmentalist Girish Raut, a Mahim resident, said state politicos and babus have learnt little from the July 26 deluge: “At a time when sea levels are rising and global warming is upon us, any attempt at reclaiming the sea or the foreshore land will only lead to more flooding.”
