Blurry skyline: Businesses hold their breath in Mumbai's smog-choked skies

With project execution and commercial office operations unaffected, city hopes for its air troubles to blow over

If filmmaker Basu Chatterjee’s iconic Mumbai movies were to be filmed today, they would lack their double-decker buses, Premier Padmini taxis, and clear skies.

Mumbai’s air quality recorded last week was the second most polluted in the world.

Ironically, clues to the city’s deteriorating air quality also lie in those iconic movies  — the delayed withdrawal of monsoons, real estate, and transport systems.

Post-pandemic, Mumbai appears to be in a mad rush to complete its Metro transit system and other transport projects in a bid to decongest and depollute the city. Under execution is a 300-plus-kilometre (km) Metro system project to be commissioned in phases, a 21-km trans-harbour link connecting the island city to its satellite, and a road running parallel to the city’s coast, in addition to a couple of flyovers and bridges.

The state is also due for elections next year. The city’s first-ever Metro line and an upgraded airport terminal were both inaugurated in close proximity to the 2014 elections. With the infrastructure boom, the city has almost doubled its real estate construction compared to 2020-21 (FY21), data shows.  The Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) has shown a 36 per cent growth since 2021–22 and a 98 per cent growth since FY21, according to Liases Foras, a real estate research company. According to the agency, the incremental construction during 2022-23 was 72.8 million square feet in MMR alone.

In addition to the construction frenzy, according to experts, as monsoon withdrawal was delayed in the city, the warm sea and surface caused an anticyclonic impact on wind movement, covering the city’s skyline with brown dust and smog. The fallout? The medical fraternity is reporting a rise in respiratory complaints. “We are witnessing around a 25 per cent surge in outpatient cases related to respiratory illnesses. However, not all patients are recommended for tests, so we cannot say for certain if air pollution is the only cause of this surge or if there are other supplementary causes,” said Dr Farah Atul Ingale, director of internal medicine at Hiranandani Fortis Hospital, Vashi, adding, “Modern construction involves many different materials. These materials can travel deep into your lungs and cause silicosis, which is incurable and rarely leads to death.”

Sales data for air purifiers in the city further support Ingale’s suspicion.

At Vijay Sales, the electronic goods chain, the number of air purifiers sold has gone up to 100 a month from eight to 10 a month. To put the number in context, Mumbai households are seldom known to use air purifiers.

“These sales are mostly based on doctors’ recommendations and are not a trend for every season," said Nilesh Gupta, managing director of Vijay Sales, adding, “These few purifiers that we used to sell earlier in Mumbai were usually bought by the expat population living in the city. However, in a few years, we will reach a stage where having an air purifier in every office will be a must.”

The city’s municipal authority, Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), has now sprung into action to settle some of the dust.  The measures, according to veteran real estate developers of the city such as Niranjan Hiranandani, founder and managing director of Hiranandani Group, are the first of their kind for the city. The municipality introduced a raft of measures, 27 in total, including sprinklers, vehicle tyre-washing facilities, and disposal of construction materials, among others, largely applicable to the city’s construction sites.

Hiranandani believes the municipality so far has opted for the lowest-hanging fruit.  “There are multiple contributors to the pollution, including dust. Mitigating dust is the first step, and easier,” he said, adding, “The new measures are welcome, and the industry will comply and wait for the future course of action.”

Others in air quality management concur. “Dust is one of the contributors; there are others like industrial chemicals, including illegal garages set up almost outside every slum in the city,” said a former civic official. Even as the city’s corporation kicks into action, not many on the business front are particularly worried. “The measures suggested so far are viable; the industry will comply and wait and watch,” said Anuj Puri, chairman at Anarock Property Consultants.

For infrastructure projects, an industry executive added, “For projects that are closer to the sea, like the Mumbai Coastal Road, the new measures should not be an issue. Further, most of the material movement of such projects has already happened,” the executive said.

Larsen & Toubro, Tata Projects, and Hindustan Construction Com­pany are among the companies executing infrastructure projects in the city. A media query sent to these companies remained unanswered. Puri added that the hope is that the air quality situation does not go the ‘Delhi’ way. 

“There will be an impact on project scheduling, labour, and cost if the authorities decide to halt construction activities,” he said. The former civic official offers assurance that Mumbai’s air troubles are different from those of the national Capital. “Here, unlike Delhi (due to stubble burning), the authorities have full power over the contributors to pollution,” he said.

BMC, in its circular, added that the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board will monitor air pollution from industries such as Bharat Petroleum Corporation, Hindustan Petroleum Corporation, Rashtriya Chemicals and Fertilizers, and Tata Power for the next month and take appropriate action. Meanwhile, according to media reports, public interest litigation has been filed before the Bombay High Court to seek judicial intervention to address Mumbai’s air pollution.

As of Saturday, Mumbai recorded an air quality of 150, a moderate level, a notch below red, according to the SAMEER application of the Central Pollution Control Board.

Many in the city, like Hiranandani, are hoping that “kind winds coming from the sea blow away the pollutants as they have in the past”.