The environment ministry’s expert appraisal committee (EAC), scheduled to meet on Friday to conduct a feasibility study on allowing a second airport at Navi Mumbai, will have to do some tight rope walking. given that both minister of civil aviation Praful Patel and minister of environment Jairam Ramesh are talking in contradictory voices.
Mr Patel is demanding a decision on the Navi Mumbai airport be expedited, Mr Ramesh is been insisting that the vacant stretch of defence land at Kalyan be considered as a serious alternative. While the civil aviation secretary, M. Madhavan Nambiar, met principal secretary in the PMO, T.K.A. Nair, on Wednesday, the Bombay Environment Action Group (BEAG) have shot off a letter to the Prime Minister highlighting that half the money for the Navi Mumbai airport will be spent on altering the courses of the Ulve and Ghadi rivers, displacing mangroves and making the fragile coastal zone resilient enough to withstand the new airport.
Debi Goenka, executive trustee of the Conservation Action Trust, said, “Over 1,700 acres of ministry of defence land has been lying vacant at Kalyan and can be used to build an alternative airport. To suddenly claim that Bhabha Atomic Resesarch Centre is building a laboratory there is a little strange. If hills can be flattened, forests cut and entire rivers be re-routed, then why can’t a laboratory, which is in the process of being constructed, be re-located somewhere else ?”
Mr Goenka is also surprised at the manner in which .another alternative airport site of Rewas-Mandwa, partly owned by the defence minsitry, has not been consdiered. “No consideration has been given to the fact that the Navi Mumbai airport will be located close to the ElephantaCaves, the Karnala Bird Sanctuary and Materan,” he pointed out.
Consevationists are also appalled by the fact that CIDCO report does not make any mention of why other sites are not feasible especially since the Navi Mumbai site is a lowlying marshy mudflat with two rivers and hills. The CIDCO study was submitted to the PMO without getting any public comment and is perceived as being a clear attempt to bypass public opinion about its unsuitability. CIDCO officials claim the cost of constructing an airport at either Rewas or Kalyan would be phenomenally higher than that of the Navi Mumbai site.