These location choices are not a coincidence. The first report where the Creek was mentioned in 1872 urged consideration of the Creek as a drain for sewage.

Since colonial times, successive governments have dumped sewage in creek waters, treating it as a sanitation infrastructure.

Indeed, sanitation officials and scientific studies repeatedly talk about the ‘flushing’ action of the Creek as the tidal waters sweep in and out, twice daily. Its tidal nature seems to be used to justify selecting it for disbursing of sanitation waste. 

Up until the late 1990s, Mumbai region’s big cities did not treat sewage, instead indiscriminately letting it out into the Creek. Thereafter pollution control norms mandated treating of such waste which led to setting up of sewage treatment plants (STPs), although Pollution Control Board reports show such STPs continually flouted treatment norms.

With intervention from environment activists, more stringent municipal wastewater treatment norms requiring recycling of sewage and conversion of energy to waste were mandated during 2016-2019.

New STPs are now being planned but they too are located mainly in estuarine marshlands – building on long histories of dumping in the sea.

Supported by the flushing action of the Thane Creek, Mumbai, Thane and Navi Mumbai, have been able to grow and not only because the Creek has absorbed their sewage. Solid waste has also been used to make land out of the creek, a lucrative practice that has continued from colonial times to after Indian Independence.

Mirza describes how two yards of kachra (garbage) was used to level one yard of ground in the Deonar dumpyard. The colonial BMC classified this land as khajan (coastal/riverside land which is marshy and low lying).

By 1908, the BMC’s Health Dept had sponsored 116 acres of reclaimed creek land through dumping garbage. Such reclamations were done to cost effectively treat waste, drain marshlands that public health officials of the mid-19th century saw as contributing to disease (McFarlane, xx), and create valuable land in the process.

While the growing mountains of waste in dumpsites in the Creek have for long silently harmed the communities residing and working in and around, it caught the public eye only when it proved hazardous to a larger, more middle class public.

The Deonar dumpyard, spread over 132 ha and encircled by the Creek on 3 sides, has mountains of waste as tall as an 18 storey building (Roy, xxx). The noxious gases it generates led to a serious fire in 2016, which spread to Mulund landfill, and which gassed the whole city for nearly a week.

This generated pressure from middle class residents to close the landfills and use ‘scientific’ methods to treat the waste. 

But both citizen complaints and governmental action have narrowly focused on risks to (selective) human life from visible (usually solid) waste and those faced on dry land.

For instance, how waste is experienced by waste pickers as they rummage through garbage heaps (resulting in calls for ‘scientific’ treatment of waste) or how the health of residents of nearby settlements are affected by noxious gases and smells (which dictate the capping/sealing of landfills).

But in a city made of watery ground, thats flooded with monsoonal rains for many months, waste cannot be confined to dry land.

We need to pay attention to how waste transforms the Creek ecosystem through a series of complex reactions as hot water from the power plant, sewage and industrial effluents, garbage and construction debris all interact to produce a Creek that is increasingly muddy and toxic.

These wetland transformations hold different and unequal harms and possibilities for both human and beyond human.

We take you now to these stories of encounter, mutation and unequal harm between human and beyond human, as they navigate siltation and muddiness in the tidal Creek.

Navigating
Chikhal (Mud)

Fishers remember the Creek as being wide and deep, without the thick growth of mangroves that today line its banks. But today the Creek is increasingly muddy. For men and women fishers of the creek, fishing is increasingly about navigating the mud, or chikhal, as they call it. Scientists using LandSat images and geospatial assessments concur with this stating that due to siltation and widening of mudflats along the banks over time, the creek is getting shallower and narrower (Mendiratta & Gedam, 2014).

The receding of the sea in Trombay has been accompanied by the march of the mangroves. Coming under the Forest Department’s protection since 2012, and declaring mangroves as ‘Reserve Forests’, has meant that fishers are prohibited from using these newly afforested (with mangrove) lands that they formerly used for fishing. Scientific studies and conversations with environmentalists support the fishers’ observations of mangrove growth. The mangrove cover around the creek has increased from 50.7 km2 in 1972 to 57.6 km2 in 2016 (Bhave et al, 2022).

Scientists support the fishers assertion that the Creek’s muddiness is a direct consequence of the urbanisation of Mumbai, Thane and Navi Mumbai and the quest to dispose of the city’s waste.

The unrestrained dumping of construction debris, garbage, sewage and industrial waste in the Creek leads to silting up of the Creek and the expansion of mud flats. As Mumbai and later Thane and Navi Mumbai grew, not just garbage and sewage but also huge volumes of construction debris have been dumped in the Creek as there are no separate facilities for their disposal.

These together have resulted in processes scientists and others call ‘silting’ of the Creek, but silting that is due to human intervention. This produced siltation has supported the congealing of Creek waters, blocking the water flow of smaller inlets of the creek, and expanding mud flats. 

The expanse of mud has also brought flamingos to Trombay Koliwada. Trombay’s fishers say they’ve seen flamingos only in the last 5 years in and around their Koliwada. They read the increasing flamingos as a sign of increasing chikhal, both of which harm their fishing practice and futures.

Fishers dont know what exactly these strange new phenomena are and their effects are not studied or anticipated in official climate action plans or government EIA reports.

What they do know is that they lead to a reduced fish catch and seem intimately connected to the infrastructure projects that are being built in the Creek.

With time and exposure, its likely that the chemicals found in different construction and industrial waste react with those found in garbage and sewage to produce new forms of life and new ecologies (Chitra xx).

Navigating
Kachhra (Waste)

Fishers of Trombay Koliwada describe how during the Monsoons and high tide, plastic waste leaches into the Creek from the Deonar dumpyard.

From there some finds its way into their ancestral stake fishing areas, some sticks onto the mangroves lining the creek, and the rest of it washes into the Arabian Sea.

Vinod, a fisher, shares how people from hotels and eateries dump big bags of organic waste from Vashi bridge that disappear from view at the bottom of the sea.

Its only later that they rise to the surface once the methane from the decomposing waste swells the bags and they burst, spreading a putrid stink and rotting garbage for miles around. Larger plastics, on the other hand, get stuck in the propellers of their fishing boats, damaging them.

Plastics line their fishing nets, restricting water flow through the net and causes nets to tear as the tide recedes.

Women hand pickers and cleaners have had to assemble new knowledge about fish species related to waste, about which fish is more sensitive to plastic, and what kind of waste affects fish in what way.

They talk of how the increasing kachra in the chikhal harms the fish and crab yield, of how plastic blocks the nests of crabs, sometimes even suffocating them.

Not just fishers’ incomes are affected but also their health, showing how closely tied fisher health is to the waste they increasingly have to deal with for their livelihood.

Those who catch crabs and small fish like nyuti with their hands enter the chikhal of the intertidal zone and tell how their bare hands and feet get cut by the broken glass pieces and chemical contaminants found in the chikhal.

Ironically, those who labour to clean the city’s waste from fish and provide a cheap and affordable source of protein to the city’s poor don't have access to proper sanitation systems. They are forced to send their own sewage and fish waste back into Creek waters.

Its not just fishers that suffer from waste in the tidal waters of the Creek. Studies have shown that the oysters and clams found in Mumbai’s seas are among the most polluted in the world (CIFE study, Hazardous Materials Letters).

Scientists say that oysters and clams act as bioindicators of environmental pollution as they are filter feeders, ingesting heavy metals and plastics found in their environment by constantly taking in water and siphoning it out.

But while oysters have a way to sequester heavy metals in special cells within their bodies to protect themselves, a member of the Coastal Conservation Foundation pointed out that humans dont have the same ability. The effects on human health are worrying particularly because tisrya, as they’re locally known, form a cheap source of protein for many poorer communities who forage or consume these throughout the year.

Fish have different ways of navigating chikhal and kachra – some through their absence –as they vote with their fins/flippers and flee the polluted creek and coastal waters. But some species become more plentiful.

Studies of toxicity in the Creek (Athalye, 2003) note the presence of Asia’s largest industrial zone, the Thane Belapur industrial area, on the Creek’s eastern bank and about 2000 registered industries on its western bank. These together with the large urban concentrations surrounding the Creek release an estimated 500 MLD of domestic and industrial wastewaters into the Creek.

Testing reveals the prevalence of local hydrocarbons in municipal and industrial wastewaters that heavily contribute to contamination but are released in small concentrations although more or less continuously, leading to slow, largely invisible but chronic impacts (Quadros, 2002).

The high levels of contamination render the muddy Creek a suitable habitat for those life forms that can adapt to such habitats.

Two particular species stand out here as bellwethers of both pollution and resilience: mangroves and flamingos. Both these present a contrast to the decline in fish diversity, fisheries potential and of creek fishing as a viable future.

Navigating New
Human And Beyond Human Possibilities

The mangrove species of Avicennia or tivar as the Kolis call it, is resilient in the face of greater pollution (Baseline 2016), showing considerable growth over the last 30 years. Dense mangrove forests along both banks of the Thane creek have made it a highly productive ecosystem (Quadros et al. 2016), although not for all species.

While studies recorded a decline in fish in the Thane creek from 18  to 12 species between 2001 and 2012 (Quadros, 2001; Quadros & Athalye, 2012), the Creek supports as many as 200 bird species and about 2.5 million birds annually (Chaudhari-Pachpande et al 2016).

86% of birds found in the Creek are dependent on the mangroves and mudflats, whose growth has boosted the bird population.

The Creek’s mud is rich in nutrients making it a haven for birds. The dumping of sewage and industrial effluents along with the hot water discharged by the thermal power plant creates a nourishing environment for the growth of blue-green algae and other organisms.

It isnt a coincidence that some of the best sightings of flamingos are found at the Bhandup STP. Similar to tivar, flamingos are remarkably resilient birds, able to adapt to high levels of pollution

An environmentalist from BNHS says that the first large flock of about 30,000 flamingos was sighted in the Creek only in 1994. Before that, the Creek’s habitat was less polluted and flamingos were rarely seen. But with each passing year flamingos have increased.

Today the Creek receives between 1,50,000 - 1,70,000 flamingos annually.

The spike in flamingo and bird population has nurtured a growing community of birders, bird tours and an uptick in scientific studies of avian patterns and behavior. In 2004, environmentalists fought to declare the Creek an Important Bird and Biodiversity Area (IBA). These bird communities played a role in the carving out of 1694 ha of the west bank of the Thane Creek for a Flamingo Sanctuary in 2015 that seemed to promise more protection for flamingos and wetlands.

But it turns out that the Sanctuary was a trade-off for constructing the MTHL sea-link connecting Mumbai to Navi Mumbai, the planned Navi Mumbai airport and a larger region.
‍
(D’Monte, 2018)

The starting point of the MTHL sea bridge in Sewri (Mumbai) and the landing point in Nhava (Navi Mumbai) required occupying areas of mudflats and mangroves and was seen as endangering the habitat of flamingos.

Ironically, the Maharashtra Forest Department gave permission to construct the MTHL that endangered some of the southern part of the Creek in exchange for declaring a protected sanctuary in the northern part of the Creek.

In 2022, the Sanctuary was designated as a Ramsar site, giving it international recognition and the highest level of protection. Bhandup, which witnessed bird watchers throughout the year, now sees ‘tourists’ in the flamingo season interested in spotting the pink avian.

Some Koli men mention how they ‘tie up’ with environment groups to organize boat tours for tourists from the Bhandup ferry point into the creek and back.

This has not only meant new uses for the creek- as a tourist spot for mainly middle class families and Youtubers, but also changed the means of livelihood for some in the fishing community.

City Corporations and Government Departments, notably the Mangrove Foundation of the Forest Department, have also jumped on this bandwagon, seeing the opening up of new avenues for city branding and investments in ecotourism and environmental mitigation projects. Navi Mumbai, for instance, has adopted the moniker, “Flamingo City”.

The National High Speed Rail Corporation Ltd, that is managing the Mumbai-Ahmedabad Bullet Train project has got clearance for constructing a tunnel under the Creek; as part of a Sanctuary mitigation plan, it has signed an agreement with the Mangrove Foundation to support the radio tagging of 200 birds of Thane Creek.

These projects further transform wetland ecologies.

Muddy Futures

Clearly, the intensifying muddiness of the Creek is happening through both slow processes of accretion of mud and ‘murky’ environmental deals and the construction of spectacular infrastructure.

Thane Creek’s wetland ecologies are detrimental to life as we know it, but also generate new forms and possibilities for life. In this sense, they are feral ecologies - produced from anthropocentric means but exceeding them.

We share with you three (partly speculative) futures of the Creek. Each of these is grounded in the looming muddiness of the Creek. But they are open-ended rather than closed futures with the possibility to change this.

We ask:

How might thinking/feeling with them open up generative reimaginings for how we might inhabit the urban wetlands otherwise?