Introduction
The Thane Creek is the long arm of the sea that washes Mumbai on its eastern flank, Thane on its southern end and Navi Mumbai on its western face as it extends from the Mumbai Harbour in the South to the Vasai Creek in the N-west and the Ulhas river in the North-east.
For centuries, the Thane Creek and its thicket of mangroves has supported flows of life and livelihood. The Koli creek fishers have evolved specialized ways to catch the crabs and mudskippers held by its mud/chikhal and the fish and prawns of the brackish Creek waters.
They tell stories of sailing in the Creek, living according to the time of the tides to visit relatives, go fishing or have celebrations. Fishers also tell tales of earlier times when the Thane Creek was so deep and fast flowing that Shivaji Maharaj sailed his warships down its waters, from Kalyan, where the ships were built, out through the Harbour and to the sea.
But today, Kalyan is land-locked, cut off from the flowing water of the Thane Creek. Bridges have played a key role in disconnecting the Creek.
In the last 150 years, 14 bridges have been constructed over the 26-km long Creek, with plans for several more in the pipeline.
Bridges are built and commonly justified as an infrastructure that connects. But as each bridge has been built, it has only selectively connected people, places and goods that live on solid terrains and are oriented to landward movement.
This strengthens the market value of some lands, and privileges property owners and investors in transacting land, while segmenting the Thane Creek and affecting the life based on its changing and changeable flows and currents.
Can we think of these bridges then as structures that don’t only unevenly connect life on solid ground but also that disconnect, and differently harm fluid forms of life and movement?
A New Geography
of Real Estate
The first road bridge in the Creek was built shortly after, in 1863, to connect Mumbai to the larger region and expand imperial trade circuits.
Serving imperial ambitions to expand industry and transport goods like cotton and opium, the first bridge across the Creek was a railway bridge built to support the first train in colonial India from Bombay to Thane in 1852.
After Indian Independence, the postcolonial state continued to inflict violence on the Thane Creek but this time based on a nationalist industrial imagination.
The SG Barve headed Study Group for Greater Bombay suggested the expansion of rail and road bridges over the Thane Creek that would open up new vistas for industrial and residential development in the Greater Mumbai area.
The Vashi Bridge was the first of the Thane Creek Bridges to be built in 1973, which played a crucial role in the growth of Navi Mumbai as a city.
Newer road and rail bridges have since been built or are undergoing construction to connect cities or suburbs in different parts of the Creek and two bridges carrying water pipelines have been constructed.
This supports not only industrial and urban development in the region, including of the two ports, but the spiraling of market values of land in Mumbai and the Greater Mumbai Region.
Reshaping geographies of real estate value is enabled not just by creating land connections but also by sea routes. Over the last 15 years, considerable investment has been done in upgrading and expanding the older ferry service that connected local fishing villages.
Newer luxury ferry services create new opportunities for work, leisure and speculation as they cater to investors, corporate commuters and tourists.
Beyond supporting the movement of goods and people, today building bridges functions as one link in a larger regional connective system, redefining the region’s real estate land and waterscape, and entangling its cities within global relations of expertise, technology and ‘world class’ infrastructure.
But while much has been written on how large transport infrastructure projects have reinforced mobility and power inequalities in large cities like Mumbai, not enough attention is paid to what it has done to its wetlands and waterways that flow beyond city boundaries. We zoom into the Thane Creek to give you a creek-view of what its bridges do
A Creek View
of Bridges
Kalwa Bridge
Take a look at the newly constructed Kalwa bridge at the Northern end of the Creek where it is narrowest. The bridge abutments that support the weight of its superstructure are constructed deep inside the creek on either bank.
The abutments restrict the water flow during high and low tides along either coast. More stagnant water along the abutments helps the small particles in Creek waters to settle down, creating a conducive environment for mangroves to grow.
This results in the narrowing of the creek at the location of bridge construction. We might not be surprised if, in the future, the Thane Creek ceases to exist after Kalwa.
Let us now examine the location of the Vashi Bridges. The choice to locate the first Vashi Bridge was made based on a land-centric imagination of urbanizing potential.
Vashi was an up and coming suburb of Navi Mumbai and connectivity to Mumbai would greatly enhance its growth and real estate potential. Where the first and second Vashi bridges are located is the spot where the bridge is the narrowest – likely both a cause and consequence of bridge building.
Fishers, on the other hand, see with a fluid imagination that is focused on movement of flows. They talk about this spot of the Creek as already being narrower, and therefore functioning like a gate that controls the movement of flows to the Northern end of the Creek.
With the construction of the third bridge at this spot, the TCB3 bridge, the movement of fish to the northern part of the creek has greatly reduced, seriously harming the livelihood and futures of the koliwadas located in these parts.
Vashi Bridges
In recent years, the growth in overall mangrove cover in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region has been celebrated. But little attention has been paid to where mangrove growth is occurring, and the cascading effects it has on the ecosystem.
Map (XXXX) shows the overgrowth of mangroves in the narrower Northern section of the Creek which is slowly choking the flow of water. This aids processes of siltation – the settling of fine particles carried by the tidal waters, in turn enabling mangroves to further expand.
In Trombay Koliwada fishers say that the construction of bridges is a crucial factor that has contributed significantly to the increase of mangroves. A close examination of XXX bridge location in Thane Creek suggests that the overgrowth of mangroves is strongly related with bridge construction over a long period of time.
Considerable construction activity is ongoing in the Creek. And the frequency of uncanny events is increasing, say the fishers. Might the two be intimately connected?
The Uncanny Blackening of Javla
This was the time when the Creek bed was being excavated and a large amount of concrete was being poured in to create a stable foundation for the bridge’s pillars.
During the construction of the Thane Creek Bridge 3 and Atal Setu, in the peak of the fishing season, women fishers from Trombay Koliwada continuously complained about the uncanny blackening of jawla, a type of shrimp that the Creek is famous for.
In the process, dredged sludge is dumped into the creek and fine particles of cement, chemicals, sludge, and paint leach into the water. The reactions triggered by these hazardous chemicals are likely what caused the jawla to blacken, rendering it unsellable and uneatable.
This greatly harmed the incomes of the women jawla dryers in Trombay Koliwada. But these losses were not counted when the State Government decided who was to get compensation for damages caused by infrastructure projects.
This is because we currently have no effective frameworks for measuring damages (and estimating compensation) in fluid terrains like the Thane creek.
Our default frameworks and laws for estimating damage and compensation are land-based, grounded in the fixity of territory and standardised time. When translating these into a fluid context, we face considerable difficulties.
For instance, fishing in the Creek is highly localized and context-dependent, shaped by the local ecology and its rhythms.
Crab catching is done at certain times of the day, season and in certain spaces (eg the intertidal zone) and this is different from jawla or oyster picking. But the surveys done by government agencies to measure impact of construction on fishing do not cover these different seasonal rhythms (temporalities), the different categories of fishing or types of fishers.
Types of fishing that are localized and vary with time and tide are seen as marginal (sometimes called ‘subsistence’ fishing in government compensation policies) despite the fact that they are unique to the place and often lucrative. As a result, ‘subsistence’ fishers such as the women jawla dryers, are left out of calculations of damage and compensation.
A Land Based Imagination
Multiple bridges criss-crossing the Creek undermine the flows of the Creek and reveal a disregard for the Thane Creek as a living habitat.
But construction of bridges in the Thane Creek is just one example of the land-based imagination that rules our urban worlds, continuing with a colonial capitalist development that has tremendous ecological and species costs. Instead, can we think of ways to connect (rather than disconnect) creek life?
This will entail focusing on pathways that lie outside of a land-based, property-centric imagination instead dwelling in the ebb and flow of water.
