BMC set to revive ambitious Gargai dam project with aim to boost water supply to city
It was temporarily halted under the Uddhav Thackeray government amid objections over felling of trees
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The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is set to rekindle the Gargai Dam project. The ambitious project — conceived in 2015 — was backed by Devendra Fadnavis when he was the chief minister. The Mumbai civic body plans to build a network of four dams with two dams each in the Gargai-Pinjal and Damanganga-Pinjal river links in the Palghar district.
The project was temporarily halted after the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maha-Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government came into power in 2019. The project was said to be opposed over felling of a large number of trees. The entire project is expected to augment the water supply of Mumbai by 865 MLD (Million Litres Per day) initially. By 2050, the overall supply will increase by 2,800 MLD, officials said.
Mumbai currently has a demand of 4,200 MLD of water. However, the BMC is able to supply 3,850 MLD daily. The dams will be spread over 1,100 hectares of land and will affect more than 4.5 lakh trees from the nearby Tanasa Wildlife Sanctuary in Palghar, according to people familiar with the matter. Meanwhile, the civic administration recently moved a proposal in the last week of March to extend the contract of 10 officials from the state government’s collectorate department designated carrying out formalities for the acquisition of lands adjoining the Gargai-Damanganga River links. The proposal states the contract needs to be extended by one more year.
Confirming the development, a senior official said the Gargai project was never officially scrapped by the BMC. “Officials whose contracts are being extended are not only involved with the Gargai project but they have other responsibilities like preparing documents for environmental clearances for various projects and other activities related to Covid management,” said the official.
“The Gargai project was never officially cancelled. The only problem for this project was there were more than four lakh trees in the catchment areas that needed to be axed, which also would require us to get environmental clearances. Therefore, we had to keep it aside since the previous government was more focused on creating the desalination plant. The tenders for the desalination plant will be floated next month and immediately after that we may restart the Gargai Dam project from where we had left off, as this is also a very important project that will prove beneficial to Mumbai in the long run,” the official said.
The BMC, civic officials said, has already acquired land parcels for rehabilitating the Project Affected Person (PAP). The civic body has also earmarked land in Chandrapur, where it aims to replant trees to compensate for those that will be cut down for constructing the dams. Back in 2016, the civic body planned a Rs 3,100 crore budget for this project. The BMC aimed to hit the operations running by 2025. However, officials said, it will take the BMC at least six more years to finish the Garga Dam project if they take up the work immediately.
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