Mumbai: Before the onset of monsoon, Shivaji Park will adorn a greener look, replacing its present pink-soil appearance with grass. If the experiment to seed lawns and maintain them succeeds, all open spaces in the city will have to have lawns, MPCB chairman Siddhes Kadam said on Monday. He said neither sports nor political or social events at the park will be allowed to dig the ground to erect pandals, nets, or stages.
Nine months after Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB) directed BMC to replace the red soil at Shivaji Park, Dadar, which residents allege has been causing dust pollution and breathing ailments, an interim report from an IIT-B professor and a landscape consultant said such action of replacing soil may not offer a complete solution. It stated that all soils, to varying degrees, can throw up dust unless there is grass to stabilise them against wind-induced resuspension.
Accordingly, Kadam said BMC has been directed to seed the lawn in a time-bound manner and appoint a curator to maintain it so that it gets strongly rooted during monsoon. “The recent Coldplay event at D Y Patil [Navi Mumbai] saw stages being erected without digging. The entire cricketing lawn inside the stadium remained intact despite thousands attending the show. Why can’t we?” he asked, admitting that the dust from open spaces was one of the major contributors to the worsening AQI.
“To ensure that the lawn is maintained well, a small state-of-the-art STP (based on local sewage supply) and a rainwater harvesting to dedicatedly take care of the water requirement by contractors and a curator for seeding and watering lawns respectively will also be set up soon,” he said, pointing out that the lawn will be planted or seeded and will not be a patchwork like in many cases where readymade patches are brought in and placed on the soil.
“These systems will make the groundwater table better too, which has been intruded by saline water,” Kadam said, pointing out that many wells in the city already had saline water presence in them and hence strengthening groundwater recharge with rainwater was the need of the hour.
According to him, if the Shivaji Park experiment achieves success, all public grounds and places will be made mandatory to have lawns on similar lines to save the city from dust pollution.
For better water resource management, city officials may implement a dual-line water system that separates recycled water from fresh water. The “two-pipe system” which would have one pipeline separated for recycled and fresh water.
Officials said the new system could improve use of recycled water by distributing it effectively across the city. Segregation will help maximise water usage while reserving fresh water for essential purpose. It will reduce dependency on freshwater making the city more sustainable.