Anil Bhandari, 71, takes his padaav (small boat) out from the mangroves in Manori creek between 3:30 am and 4 am, four days a week. By 8 am, he is back ashore, sorting his catch for the local fish markets. He has been doing this since his twenties. Before him, his father did the same. Bhandari is one of Mumbai’s original Mumbaikars—the Kolis, the city’s traditional fisherfolk, whose families have worked these creeks for centuries, long before the islands were stitched together into a city. Their livelihood now lies on the alignment of the Versova–Bhayandar coastal road, an eight-lane corridor being built by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC).

“I make Rs.2,000 to Rs.2,500 a trip—about Rs.10,000 a week, Rs.40,000 to Rs.50,000 a month. My wife and I survive on this. Where will I go at this age, if I have to stop fishing?” he asked. He lives in Charkop Koli Wada, one of Mumbai’s oldest fishing hamlets. About 70 fisher families live here, all dependent on the creek and now anxious about the project that may end their livelihood.

The 26.3-km Versova–Bhayandar coastal road, estimated at Rs.18,263 crore, is the next northern extension of Mumbai’s western waterfront corridor. The first stretch, from Marine Drive to Worli—formally named the Dharmaveer Swarajya Rakshak Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj Coastal Road—is operational. Worli connects to Bandra via the Rajiv Gandhi Sea Link; Bandra to Versova will be linked by the under-construction Swatantrya Veer Savarkar Sea Link. From Versova, the road will run along the coast through Charkop, Manori, Aksa, Madh, Marve and Malwani—every one of them home to a Koli fishing hamlet—and is to be completed by December 2029.

To clear the alignment, the BMC has begun felling and relocating mangroves. According to the corporation’s submission to the Bombay High Court, around 60,000 mangroves fall within the project’s “influence zone”, of which 45,675 will be felled or affected. About 9,000 of these will be permanently destroyed for road and bridge footprints. Another 36,925, on a 68.5-hectare belt, will be “temporarily diverted and affected” and restored later. The court has separately ordered the planting of 1,37,025 mangroves over 30 hectares in Bhayandar village, plus 36,925 more on land freed up after construction. The Forest Department, in an affidavit on November 18, 2025, has also allotted 224 hectares in Palghar district for additional mangrove afforestation.

A creek economy

Mangroves—kharfuti or kandalvan in Marathi—are nurseries for marine life. Small fish and crabs hatch and feed in their roots. “Fishermen who have only one or two small boats can fish near the mangroves in the creek and still catch enough to live on. Once the mangroves are cut, the small fishermen will not survive,” said Dhiraj Bhandari, president of the Charkop Koliwada Machhimar Sahakari Samiti (Fishermen Cooperative Society). The protein-rich catch from these waters—boi, prawns, catfish, and small mackerel—also feeds the Koli community itself, not only the markets.

Beyond fisheries, mangroves are a flood defence. They absorb storm surges, slow tidal damage, hold the soil against erosion and store unusually large amounts of carbon dioxide in roots and sediment. None of these functions, environmentalists argue, has been adequately weighed against the road’s traffic gains in the BMC’s planning.

The Bombay Environmental Action Group (BEAG) was the first to challenge the felling. On December 12, 2025, a Bench of Chief Justice Shree Chandrashekhar and Justice Gautam Ankhad of the Bombay High Court cleared the project but with strong conditions: annual compliance reports for 10 years, signed by the Municipal Commissioner and the Principal Chief Conservator of Forests; no felling without forest officers present; every tree mapped; and compensatory plantation completed first.

The NGO Vanashakti appealed to the Supreme Court. On March 20, 2026, a Bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant, with Justices Joymalya Bagchi and Vipul M. Pancholi, declined to interfere. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, for the BMC, argued that the road would cut emissions and travel time. Senior Advocate Chander Uday Singh, for Vanashakti, told the court that the BMC had repackaged an earlier afforestation drive as fresh compensatory planting; he submitted satellite imagery from October 2025 to support the claim. The Bench, while accepting the High Court’s safeguards, said the project would have a “significant and beneficial impact” on the public.

The BMC began ground work soon after. Activists allege that the High Court’s preconditions remain unmet. According to volunteers from the citizens’ campaign Save Mumbai Mangroves, neither the 1,37,025 saplings nor the relocations have been completed, and patches of existing mangroves are being submitted as fresh compensatory plantation.

A creek that has gone still

Sanjay Bhandari, a fisherman from Charkop, said his catch has fallen by about 30 per cent since felling began. “The hammering has scared the fish into deeper water,” he told Frontline. Where he used to land fish worth Rs.3,000, he now brings back Rs.2,000 worth, he said. Dhiraj Bhandari said the same was true across Charkop and Manori.

Save Mumbai Mangroves, a citizen-volunteer collective, says around 2,500 people are part of its WhatsApp network and over 100 volunteers take part in protests, ground-mapping and outreach. They are running a continuous campaign on Instagram and X, geotagging trees as they fall, and have written to the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change to withhold the project’s Stage 2 forest clearance. “The BMC has neither planted the 1.37 lakh trees nor relocated the existing mangroves. We have placed the proof before the Mangrove Suraksha Cell,” one of the volunteers said. Volunteers declined to be named, saying the work mattered more than the names attached to it.

The protests have begun to gather momentum. At Versova, where felling and piling were already underway, fisherman Pradip Koli led the local community in confronting BMC contractors and asked them to produce a work order; they could not. A video of the exchange went viral. “The work is illegal. The conditions of the high court have not been met. The BMC is bulldozing original Mumbaikars to benefit a few contractors,” Koli said.

Volunteers also flagged that approach roads to fishing jetties had been barricaded without informing the community. “Boats are anchored near the jetties, tied to the mangroves. The BMC told the court the project would not affect fishermen’s livelihoods. Now fishermen are not even getting access to their boats,” Dhiraj Bhandari said.

At the Versova protest, the fishers appealed directly to coastal residents. Mohit Ramle, who heads All Koli Community and Cultural Preservation, an organisation working on Koli heritage, said: “Those who have bought sea-facing flats paying crores of rupees must protest the destruction of mangroves. Once the flood barrier is gone, their flats will be the first to feel the high tides. Their value will not stay the same.”

A familiar arc

Mumbai’s western coastline—divided into the Marine Drive–Worli, Worli–Bandra and Bandra–Versova–Bhayandar segments—has produced a similar confrontation in each phase. In the 2000s, Mahim and Worli fishers protested the original Bandra–Worli Sea Link. In the 2010s, fishers from Mahalakshmi, Haji Ali, and Worli protested the first phase of the coastal road; they extracted one concession—the navigational gap between road pillars at Worli was widened from 60 metres to 120 metres. Eastern Mumbai’s fishers are similarly squeezed by bridges and oil pipelines.

Asked about the fishers’ fears, Maharashtra’s Fisheries and Ports Minister Nitesh Rane has repeatedly told the media that “the government will take care of them”. The fishers said they were yet to see what that meant in practice.

Save Mumbai Mangroves is the latest in a sequence of citizens’ campaigns—the Save Aarey movement against the metro car shed, the long defence of Sanjay Gandhi National Park against real estate and religious encroachment—that have shaped Mumbai’s recent civic history. The city’s environmental record, from rising temperatures to annual flooding, has not slowed the rate at which projects are commissioned.

“Whose development is this?” Anil Bhandari asked. “Have we not lived here peacefully all our lives? Is living peacefully not development? You want me to stop fishing so that you can drive your cars. Is this the development you want?”

The questions are not only for the BMC.

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