In the cool environs of the chief minister’s office in Mantralaya, South Mumbai, this connection may escape the worthy gentlemen, but, on the ground, in the heat of the day, it is inescapable. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis announced on Monday this week that his government was planning to set up a 300-acre innovation city in Navi Mumbai, which would “host everything and anything in terms of technology, innovation and AI… we have earmarked the land.” For good measure, since he was speaking at an event of the tech-software industry, Fadnavis mentioned that N. Chandrasekaran, chairperson of Tata Sons, would draw up the framework for the proposed ‘city.’

That day, the maximum temperature in Rabale, an important industrial-residential node in Navi Mumbai, touched 41 degrees Celsius, according to the India Meteorological Department’s data. It was also the day that Mumbai sizzled at nearly 38 degrees Celsius. Both the daytime land surface temperatures were record highs for February. Neither the Chief Minister nor anyone else at that event made even the slightest reference to either the unusual heat in February or, importantly, to the Development Plan 2018-38 drawn up for Navi Mumbai.

The plan has been critiqued already for ignoring the stiff challenges that climate change has placed upon the city. That the proposed 300-acre city will add to the load is a fair assumption to make. Where, in which node, is this ‘city’ planned for? How will it impact the ecology around? What will it mean for the social set-up and communities in these areas? These are presumably inconvenient questions and not meant to be asked. Those of us asking such questions are dismissed as trouble-makers, anti-development nerds, and jholawalas, among other such honourable labels.

It is not sacrilegious to ask how a proposed plan fits into the natural ecology of a place in 2025 when net-zero, carbon footprints, and emission load have not only become terms of common usage but comprise the overall impact of a large project. In fact, it should be shocking that the chief minister can announce a major project such as this, link it to the lofty goal of making Maharashtra a $1 trillion economy by 2030 as part of the national push towards a $5 trillion economy, and completely skip the local or regional realities, including ecological or climate-related ones. Navi Mumbai’s authorities will now scramble to make this massive land parcel of 300 acres available for the construction of the proposed AI innovation city, beyond what is in the climate-unmindful Development Plan.

To decongest Mumbai, the greenfield city of Navi Mumbai was planned as a satellite urban agglomeration in the 1960s. With CIDCO leading the charge, various nodes were developed by large-scale land conversion and re-engineering of forests, wetlands, mudflats, and salt pans. The environmental price was never fully calculated. From non-descript villages and agricultural land, it grew to a city of millions and is projected to house more than 2.8 million by 2038, according to the Development Plan. Since 1991, the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation has helmed the affairs of the city.

Navi Mumbai’s nodes have seen a series of environmental problems that have affected people’s lives and livelihoods, especially those of the most marginalised. From flooding, landslides and increasing frequency of cyclones to heat waves and poor Air Quality Index numbers every year, the city battles climate-related challenges nearly every month of the year. The authorities and NGOs working in the city have mapped flooding hotspots; these have increased year-on-year as the construction of buildings and infrastructure expanded in the past decade.

The National Green Tribunal (NGT) flagged off, in 2022, a collective loss of “about 22 hectares of mangrove cover due to various developmental and expansion activities”; this is 54.4 acres or roughly 20 percent of the proposed AI innovation city. Mangroves, it must be repeated, are the buffer for a coastal city. Their loss, along with the clearing of green cover in forests and hills, has meant floods in Airoli-Sanpada nodes, as well as old Sarsole-Diwale fishing villages; it has also meant a steady rise in heat waves and forest fires.

A Land Surface Temperature (LST) analysis in 2021-22 showed that the Vashi and Airoli areas recorded 44.8 degrees Celsius in March 2022. The Parsik Hill area, though a reserved forest along the eastern belt of Navi Mumbai, has seen a loss in vegetation cover and has exposed quarries now. A study by YUVA, under its Climate Justice Project, showed a 10 percent rise in school children affected by dehydration, vomiting and diarrhoea in just a year or two. In November 2022, Mahape showed an AQI of 260, as bad as that in Delhi and considered unhealthy. The Maharashtra Pollution Control Board data, in 2019, based on information from hospitals, showed a rise in patients with air-borne diseases in Navi Mumbai.

The correlation between the deliberate decline in ecological health of a place and a rise in ailments affecting people there is rarely drawn, much less studied. It should have been the responsibility of the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation to make its development plan responsive to these climatic or ecological challenges and then chart out the development of the city. This did not happen. Worse, plans are now made in Mantralaya and private companies for the 300-acre ‘city,’ whose ecological price is not clear, and few will dare to ask.

Navi Mumbai has become a hub for infotech and related activities; the state government reckons that it alone accounts for 60 percent of India’s data centre footprint. AI is not ecology-agnostic; it pulls in large amounts of power besides massive construction to host servers and so on. Fadnavis did say that he plans mixed source power, green and conventional, in the initial phases of the proposed city, but it would eventually move to green power. That is yet to be. What he needs to say is how much more green cover, how many more water bodies and how many stretches that nestle the migratory flamingos will be sacrificed for the AI innovation city – in other words, its ecological cost. Economy minus ecology, in the era of climate change, is not sustainable at all.

Smruti Koppikar, senior journalist and urban chronicler, writes extensively on cities, development, gender, and the media. She is the Founder Editor of the award-winning online journal ‘Question of Cities’ and won the Laadli Media Award 2024 for her writing in this column.