The Supreme Court has stayed the Bombay High Court’s order declaring 120 hectares in Mumbai’s Kanjurmarg as protected forest. This allows the city to use the land as a garbage landfill.
New Delhi: On August 1, the Supreme Court of India has temporarily stopped the implementation of a Bombay High Court judgment that had earlier restored the status of nearly 120 hectares of land in Mumbai’s Kanjurmarg area as a “protected forest”.
This decision clears the way for the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) to use the land as a garbage dumping site.
A bench led by Chief Justice of India B R Gavai and Justice K Vinod Chandran heard the appeal filed by the Maharashtra state government against the Bombay High Court’s order dated May 2, 2024.
The state was represented by Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, who argued that the land was originally meant to be used for garbage dumping but was wrongly marked as a protected forest due to a mistake.
According to Mehta, the land in question—119.91 hectares—was incorrectly declared a protected forest, even though it had long been used for dumping waste. Therefore, the state government had issued a fresh notification to cancel the earlier one and allow the land to continue being used as a landfill.
The top court agreed with this reasoning and passed an interim order saying,
“We will stay the order.”
When an advocate opposed the stay and tried to argue against the landfill use, the Supreme Court questioned him, saying,
“You tell us where the garbage can be dumped now.”
The Bombay High Court had earlier rejected the state government and the civic body’s argument that the 2005 notification declaring the land a forest was issued by mistake.
The High Court had said,
“In view of the forest notification having been a product of specific and clear factual review, the impugned notification to exclude 119.91 hectares of land by re-issuing the forest notification by way of a corrigendum, deserves to be quashed and set aside.”
It further stated that the correction made by the state through a new notification in 2023 was not in accordance with the law, calling it:
“unsustainable and in conflict with the requirement of law governing de-reservation of a forest.”
The issue dates back to a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed in 2013 by a public trust named Vanashakti. The PIL challenged the de-notification of the Kanjurmarg land, which had previously been declared a protected forest in official records.
Interestingly, in 2009, the Union Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC) had already granted environmental clearance to set up a garbage landfill project on the same land.
This approval was considered by the civic body to argue that the use of land as a dumping ground was both planned and permitted.
They maintained that their 2023 notification did not change the nature of the land, but only corrected an earlier mistake in the forest records.
According to them, the correction was made because the forest notification had wrongly included this area, which had always been a landfill.
The Supreme Court’s stay order will remain in effect until the final hearing of the case. This temporary relief is significant for the MCGM, which has been struggling to find suitable dumping grounds for the city’s growing waste problem.
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