BMC's climate budget: old wine in a new bottle?

Hindustan Times

18 hours ago

Mumbai: Jumping on the World Environment Day bandwagon, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) on Thursday put their money where their mouth is, announcing a ₹17,000-crore 'climate budget' for the city.
The civic body claimed that 37% of its capital expenditure budget will go towards 'climate-allied' activities. These include a wide range of things, from the biomining of the Deonar dumping ground to electric buses for BEST and solar panels, along with the construction of toilets, water infrastructure, markets, homes for project-affected people (PAP), and new fire brigade stations, among others.
The BMC has increased its climate budget from last year's ₹10,224.24 crore by including the Brihanmumbai Electricity Supply and Transport Undertaking (BEST) and seven more departments within it. Most of the activities listed in the budget are old BMC plans due to their effect on climate change. In March 2024, the BMC also created a new environment and climate change department.
Claiming that its actions are working, the BMC also released data for greenhouse gas emissions till 2022-23, which showed a decrease from 2019-20 figures, but an increase from the Covid years in between.
The BMC's climate spending takes its Mumbai Climate Action Plan (MCAP), launched in 2022, as its benchmark. The plan is a strategic framework to make Mumbai climate-resilient and achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
However, the ambit of the climate budget is wide. On the one hand, it concentrates on mitigating climate change, which would reduce greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, it also focuses on increasing the resilience of the city's population to the effects of climate change, i.e. adaptation.
This gives the BMC a wide remit of activities to include under its climate spends. For instance, under unquantifiable actions taken, some of the activities listed include building toilets and installing sanitary napkin vending machines and incinerators in public toilets; laying water pipelines, constructing storage tanks, a new water treatment plant and a desalination plant to improve water supply; stabilisation of hill slopes to reduce disaster risk; concessions for BEST bus tickets to those with disabilities; laying sewer lines; new healthcare facilities; improvement of footpaths, construction and maintenance of foot-over-bridges; a transportation and commercial hub at Dahisar Check Naka, municipal markets, PAP homes for the Goregaon Mulund Link Road project; and even a swimming pool and sports complex.
Environmentalists, who are not new to challenging the BMC, were sceptical of the lofty budget. 'How to destroy the climate for 364 days, and how to plan for correcting the destruction for one day: that is the crux of the BMC's climate action plan,' said Zoru Bhathena, an environmental activist.
'The budget doesn't mention anything new that the civic body shouldn't already be doing,' said Debi Goenka, executive trustee of the nonprofit Conservation Action Trust. 'Setting up LED lights was introduced 10 years ago. Why is it newly added in the budget? BEST has already placed orders for EV buses that have not been delivered yet, so it is the same thing repeating. Many measures that could be taken up are severely lacking, including simple things like adding solar panels at bus depots. All this while the BMC is continuing to cut trees rampantly.'
Sumaira Abdulali, founder of the NGO Awaaz Foundation, concurred. 'The number of trees being cut for infrastructure projects will not be covered in the greening of islands that they have taken up,' she said. 'As per the climate budget report, the PM 2.5 and PM 10 levels have come down to about 85 on average. Averaging out the winter numbers with the whole year will definitely bring it down. That doesn't mean the pollution is less. Regulation of the construction sites doesn't need a different budget. There just has to be proper enforcement of the AQI norms,' she added.