The Special Provisions for Greater Mumbai

In one line

Three sub-paragraphs of the coastal notification are about the city this paper is set in, and every student sitting it lives inside them.

In the wording a student can write in an examination: paragraph 10.3 of the Coastal Regulation Zone Notification 2019 makes special provision for the coastal regulation zone areas falling within the municipal limits of Greater Mumbai, providing that in order to protect and preserve the green lung of the Greater Mumbai area all open spaces, parks, gardens and playgrounds indicated in development plans within CRZ-II shall be categorised as No Development Zone, with a Floor Space Index of up to fifteen per cent allowed only for the construction of civic amenities, a stadium and a gymnasium meant for recreational or sports related activities, the residential or commercial use of such open spaces not being permissible; and that the construction of sewage treatment plants in a CRZ-I area for the purpose of treating the sewage from the municipal area shall be taken up only by the municipal authorities in exceptional circumstances where no alternate site is available, subject to the recommendations of the Coastal Zone Management Authority and the approval of the Central Government, and in case construction of such a plant is inevitable in a mangrove area a minimum of three times the mangrove area affected, destroyed or cut during the construction process shall be taken up for compensatory plantation of mangroves.

Why Mumbai has its own paragraph

Because no other Indian city has this combination. A coastline of about a hundred and fifty kilometres including creeks. A population of well over a crore. Mangroves inside the municipal limits. The largest concentration of high value coastal real estate in the country. And an existing development plan that has designated open spaces since long before the coastal notification existed.

Apply the ordinary CRZ-II rules to Greater Mumbai and two things follow that the drafter was not willing to accept. The open spaces in the development plan, which are already scarce, become buildable because CRZ-II has no No Development Zone. And the city's sewage treatment plants, which must be near the sea, become impossible because the shore is CRZ-I.

Paragraph 10.3 addresses both.

The green lung provision

What it does. All open spaces, parks, gardens and playgrounds indicated in development plans within CRZ-II are categorised as No Development Zone.

This is an unusual technique and it repays attention. CRZ-II has no No Development Zone as a category. What the paragraph does is to import a No Development Zone into CRZ-II, and to define it not by a distance from the High Tide Line but by a designation on a municipal development plan.

The consequence. A plot in a built up coastal ward of Mumbai which is shown as a garden, a park, a playground or an open space on the development plan cannot be built on for residential or commercial purposes, and no distance from the sea will change that.