City on the Brink: Environmental Movements in Mumbai

City on the Brink: Environmental Movements in Mumbai was a seminar hosted in partnership with Center for the Advanced Study of India & the South Asia Center on the 30th of October. In this seminar, Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar, award winning journalist and CASI Visiting Fellow, reflected on the trajectory of environmental issues in Mumbai in the past few decades, focusing on air pollution and environmental movements around addressing poor air quality in the city.

“Mumbai is a larger-than-life city”, proclaimed Chandrashekhar. Simultaneously, it is one that has experienced rapid population growth, industrialization and land privatization since the 1950s. A consequence of these changes is an increase in pollution— particularly air pollution. The broader issue of air pollution has been taken up on both municipal and national levels since the 1980s, largely focusing on the link between public health and pollution as well as reducing vehicular emissions. However, half a century after the city’s first battle with air pollution, the air quality of the city has been steadily declining. A combination of the effect of climate change—the La Niña event and weakening coastal winds, and anthropogenic factors—industrial emissions and resuspended dust—have left the city struggling to breathe. While municipal efforts to combat the pollution, from cloud seeding to installing municipal smog towers, are well intentioned, they lack the capacity to effectively and consistently improve the quality of Mumbai’s air.

The final section of Chandrashekar’s talk traced lineages of environmental activism in the city, from early activist groups such as SOCLEEN and Save Bombay Committee to the present day. In recent decades, environmental activism has increasingly become centered around online spaces, lacking in both on-ground participants and organizing expertise. At the same time, social media movements have inculcated an awareness of climate change among the public and have allowed a wide network of environmental activists to connect.

Mumbai, the site of India’s first civic and legal battles to save its natural environment, is also a city constantly under development, and a site of world-class infrastructure projects. The consequences, however, are felt by the city through increased coastal erosion and dwindling air quality. As climate change brings in more environmental risk, it is necessary for both government bodies at all levels to seriously address these issues.