MUMBAI, Sept. 24 -- The city's eastern suburbs are likely to lose 8.2 acres of mangroves at Bhandup to Phase IV of the Goregaon-Mulund Link Road (GMLR)'s cloverleaf junction. The Maharashtra Coastal Zone Management Authority (MCZMA) will decide on this case in its meeting on September 24. The 12.2-km GMLR has an underground 5.3-km twin tunnel beneath Sanjay Gandhi National Park, which will connect Film City in Goregaon with Amar Nagar in Mulund West. The BMC, which is implementing the project, has planned a clover leaf interchange at the junction of GMLR and the Eastern Express Highway to "enable signal-free traffic movement, reduce congestion, improve road safety and enhance regional connectivity". However, the environmental price the city will pay for this is the destruction of 187 mangroves and 217 trees. Once completed, GMLR will be a direct connection between the Western Express Highway and Eastern Express Highway and a good facilitator of east-west connectivity. Traffic experts say that the project will reduce travel time between the eastern and western suburbs from around 90 minutes to 25 minutes besides easing congestion on existing roads. Digging on the underground tunnel began on August 17. An upset Nandkumar Pawar, president of the Maharashtra Small Scale Traditional Fish Workers Union, told HT that fishermen were never consulted on these projects. "Mangroves and intertidal areas are fishing and breeding zones for fish and crabs," he said. "These are important for our livelihood. The government always talks of compensatory afforestation, but mangroves cannot be replanted. We will strongly oppose it." The compensatory afforestation, incidentally, is at Brahmapuri in faraway Chandrapur district. Environmental activist D Stalin of NGO Vanashakti called the "continuous destruction" of mangroves "insane". "There is zero consideration for mangroves and coastal ecology," he said. "Every institution that is supposed to protect the mangroves has been compromised. The MCZMA has become a rubber stamp body waiting to sanction every application to remove mangroves. The Bombay high court should step in and stop people from handing out permissions to denude the city of its mangrove cover." Talking about the proposed compensatory afforestation in Chandrapur, Stalin said, "The absurd, illogical and unscientific process of removing mangroves from the coastal wetlands of Mumbai and terming terrestrial plantation in Chandrapur as compensatory is unacceptable. Chandrapur, interestingly, seems to have enough land to accommodate the Amazon forest since every so-called mitigation is in Nagpur."...