Mumbai city was originally reclaimed from the sea by joining seven islands, with the intention of creating a shipping and trading hub for the British. However, the city that resulted from this exercise attracted a magnitude of population which was very disproportionate to that in any of the surrounding regions.
The MMR was notified in 1967, in an effort to address the rising problems that the existing inhabitants were facing. Many more areas were included within the region; today, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region includes Greater Mumbai, Thane, Kalyan and Navi Mumbai in addition to many additional towns and villages.
Due to Mumbai’s unique geographical positioning, the growth of urban sprawl in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region has been very lopsided. Until the early ’70s, most of the MMR’s urban built-up area was concentrated in the Island city and its immediate suburbs, so the expansion of real estate development was more or less constrained within this region.
About 3/4th of the population was residing within this relatively small area. However, the city’s road and rail networks expanded remarkably quickly beyond Greater Mumbai, which resulted in growth being driven toward Vashi, Thane, Panvel and Kalyan.
Over the years, this trend has been maintained and accelerated. Today, with available land at an extremely high premium in the primary city, even the furthest suburbs like Khalapur, Uran and Karjat have seen the consumption of their agricultural and forest lands to make way for real estate development.
In the current times, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region is extremely curtailed in its scope for unilateral growth and Mumbai’s resident population has exploded beyond all bounds. Any kind of explosion required a sufficiently large area for its fallout to spread; Mumbai’s population explosion and the real estate development pattern that has resulted is very much akin to the firing of a bullet, with the path being directed by the barrel’s constraints.
By Arvind Jain
