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"We are not afraid of snakes or leopards, we are afraid of vikas (development)!" said Prakash Bhoir, a forest rights activist and a resident of Kelti Pada, one of the tribal hamlets vilages in Mumbai's Aarey Forest.
To many, Bhoir's statement may sound a bit unreasonable. But there's more to what appears behind it.
Aarey Forest — the lungs of Mumbai, one of the last and the largest forest patches of the city is also home to scores of Adivasi voters across 27 tribal villages. Over the years, they made national headlines while vehemently opposing the Mumbai Metro depot construction.
But while the Metro carshed is now anyway constructed, the tribals ask — If the government had the means and the will to fight for the car shed, couldn't it have given us proper roads, electricity, and water supply in all these years?
'Living Here Since Before Independence, Couldn't Get Electricity?'
For most tribals of Aarey, generations have lived in the forest, some since before Independence. Across villages in Aarey, one common issue that was flagged was lack of constant supply of electricity. In fact, six tribal families living in Jitunicha pada have never had a direct electricity supply to their homes.
"The country got Independence in 1947. It's been about 75 years. There has never been electricity. Now, we pay someone and borrow electricity for our homes. They disconnect that too sometimes. We don't have our own metres yet. There is a transformer here. But they don't give permissions to dig for the connections," said Sunil Varte, oen of the very few residents of the hamlet.
Asked why he did not move to another village all these years, Varte said: "My family has cultivated this land for years. How can we just leave it behind?"
Across the years, supply of electricity for the tribal villages of Aarey has been a gradual process, with some of them having got electricity as recent as 2019. But for most villages, the supply is irregular at best.
With low education rate in most villages, very few have secure jobs with most still having farming as their primary occupation. Some, like Bhoir and Bharat Chaudhary who do do both, flagged several other issues.
"There is forest everywhere here. If there is a snakebite, the hospitals are far. Such small remedies aren't available in the hospital either. The government hospital here had facilities next to nothing. It was on the verge of shutting down. We had also requested that if the Aarey authorities cannot run it, the BMC must run it," Choudhary said.
Bhoir, who has been associated with the 'Save Aarey' campaign and was born in the forest, asked why successive governments lacked the will to provide them with basic facilities.
"There are villages which have buildings in the backdrop. The light of those buildings reaches them but there is no electricity in the village. It is a struggle to get NOCs and permissions. People don't have as much money that they will be able to pay bribes. When it comes to water, most villages are on the hills. Some villages don't even have water pipelines yet," Bhoir said.
"When the car shed was built there, it was built so rapidly. Why does work for us not happen that fast? Are we not humans? For their development projects, facilities like electricity, water, is made available immediately. But it doesn't reach the Adivasi villages. If they can get vikas, why can't we?," he asked.
Amrita Bhattacharjee, social worker and activist associated with the Save Aarey movement for years, narrated the troubles women form the tribal villages face.
"One big concrete road has been built due to Metro car depot because they needed to carry the Metro rakes inside. Hence, that road was concretised. But if you come inside, the roads are broken so badly that an Adivasi woman who was being taken to a hospital in an auto rickshaw delivered the baby in the auto," she said.
Govt's Aarey Revamp Plans Battle Trust Deficit
On 30 April this year, the government told the Bombay High Court that it will repair 45 km of internal roads in Aarey within two years, while the bench asked the government to complete the work in the “minimum possible period”.
But other than basic facilities, unresolved issues from land acquisition by MMRCL and concretisation of Aarey remain to be some of the biggest concerns of the tribals.
The speedy enhancement of the Mumbai Metro project is cited as one of the key achievements by the ruling Mahayuti government. But tribals fear that the car shed is just one of the many more projects that the government wishes to bring in, and at the same time, plans to push out tribals to Slum Redevelopment Authority (SRA) housings.
In October 2023, the Maharashtra government floated a tender to appoint a consultant to prepare a master plan to revamp Aarey colony. According to the tender document, the consultant will be tasked to come with a sustainable plan balancing urban development, environmental preservation, and community needs, and also identify spots for tourism development. But all of this, without touching the forest cover and including Aarey residents in the process.
In 2020, the then Maharashtra government led by Uddhav Thackeray had notified over 800 acres of Aarey land as reserved forest.
But years of conflict over the Metro car shed project has led to severe trust deficit between the government and the locals.
"The car shed is a means to enter Aarey. The car-shed is not as small as it looks. The more projects come, more forests will be destroyed, more Adivasis will lose their farms," Bhoir said.
"We should not be removed from here. Whoever comes wants us to evacuate. We are not afraid of snakes or leopards, what we are afraid of is vikas. They say 'we will get developed homes with electricity and water supply, there are leopards and snakes here'. We are not scared of leopards and snakes, we are scared of development. Our ancestral lands, our culture, our lifestyle, our relationship with the forest we will lose it all," he said.
'Vikas in Jungle, Not Without It': How Aarey's Tribals Will Vote
As Mumbai is all set to vote, Manoj Dhinde and several other volunteers associated with the Adivasi Haqq Samvardhan Samiti have been spreading awareness on the importance of voting and the issues that the Aarey tribals must vote on. They also helped register new voters ahead of the elections.
"When elections approach, the local corporators and councillors will make roads, toilets, or just merely paint toilets and put up big banners.There are people who are paid to vote too. They should check the history of the candidates who they are voting for," Dhinde said.
"Who is this development for? The basic necessities like education and healthcare should be guaranteed first. Pregnant women in labour sit on bikes to reach hospitals. These are the issues that people must vote on but unfortunately, issues get sidelined while voting," Bhattacherjee said.
Bhoir said that one of the reasons facilities may not have reached them all these years is because the number of voters are too less to be able to harm anybody's prospects.
"The villages are small. I feel that they don't give us facilities here because the voters are very less. In other parts of Mumbai where slums have expanded, they got facilities like electricity and water supply way sooner because there are too many voters in slums that can make a difference. Now, we just expect that a leader will come like God and save us," Bhoir said.
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