Maharashtra Has Barren Land. So Why Does Development Keep Coming for Its Forests?

Maharashtra has cleared nearly 83,700 sq ft of forest land for two projects associated with Adani Group companies. Nearly 70,000 sq ft of this involves reserved forest and mangrove land in Raigad for Adani Cementation’s proposed cement terminal, while another roughly 13,800 sq ft of forest land in Amravati has been cleared for a gas pipeline.

Taken by itself, 83,700 sq ft may sound like a small number in a state as enormous as Maharashtra. That, however, is precisely why this decision raises a much larger question. The issue is not simply how many trees may disappear because of these two projects. It is the philosophy through which Maharashtra decides which land must make way whenever development comes knocking.

Nobody seriously arguing for Maharashtra’s economic future can demand that the state stop building ports, pipelines, factories, logistics parks, roads or industrial infrastructure. Maharashtra must build more, not less. It must compete aggressively for investment, create employment, improve logistics and reduce the cost of moving goods. A state of more than 12 crore people cannot preserve itself into prosperity.

But development and environmental destruction are not synonyms.

Before a government permits reserved forests or mangroves to be diverted, there should be one brutally simple question: Why this land?

Why could the project not move? Why could the alignment not change? Why could additional road or rail connectivity not be built? What non-forest sites were examined? How much more would those alternatives have cost? And was the forest genuinely unavoidable, or merely the easiest obstacle to remove?

That is the question Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and his government should answer.

Maharashtra Is Not a Land-Starved City-State

Maharashtra covers roughly 307,700 sq km. According to the India State of Forest Report 2023, the state’s forest cover is around 50,858 sq km. The Forest Survey of India produces this assessment as the country’s official biennial measurement of forest cover.

Now consider another number.

The Government of India’s Wastelands Atlas maps large stretches of Maharashtra under various wasteland classifications. The 2015-16 assessment put Maharashtra’s wasteland area at roughly 36,000 sq km, encompassing categories that include scrub, degraded land, rocky areas and other forms of land classified as wasteland.

That does not mean Maharashtra possesses 36,000 sq km of perfectly flat, environmentally worthless, government-owned industrial plots waiting beside highways.

Some classified wasteland may itself be ecologically valuable. Some may be degraded forest. Some may be rocky or inaccessible. Some may lack water, electricity or connectivity. Some parcels may have ownership or habitation complications.

But that caveat strengthens rather than destroys the argument.

If Maharashtra has tens of thousands of square kilometres falling under different degraded or wasteland classifications, shouldn’t the state possess a sophisticated mechanism for identifying which portions genuinely have low ecological value and can support development?

And shouldn’t those options be examined before reserved forests and mangroves enter the conversation?

Forest diversion should not occur because an alternative parcel is less convenient. It should occur only when an alternative parcel is genuinely unreasonable.

The Question Fadnavis Must Answer: Why This Land?

Whenever forest land is approved for diversion, governments tend to discuss whether the necessary procedures were followed. Permissions were obtained. Conditions were imposed. Compensatory afforestation was prescribed. Net present value was calculated. Another department gave another approval.

That answers the legal question.

It does not answer the planning question.

Why did the project reach the forest in the first place?

For the Raigad cement terminal, Maharashtra should be willing to publicly demonstrate what alternative locations were studied and why they failed. If port proximity was essential, how essential? Could some components have been located farther inland? Could better road or rail connectivity have compensated for additional distance?

For a pipeline, the question becomes one of alignment. Pipelines obviously have endpoints and geographical constraints. But routes are designed. What alternative alignment was considered? What environmental damage would each have caused? Was the approved route genuinely the least damaging viable option?

The burden of proof is currently upside down.

Nature is repeatedly required to prove why it deserves protection.

It should be the developer and government that prove there was nowhere reasonably better to go.

Development Does Not Always Have to Sit Beside the Port

Maharashtra’s own logistics policy demolishes the idea that economic activity must always be physically attached to a coastline or transport hub.

Jawaharlal Nehru Port Authority has pursued dry ports and multimodal logistics infrastructure precisely to extend port connectivity into Maharashtra’s hinterland. JNPA’s projects include the Jalna dry port/MMLP and plans around Wardha, where road and rail connectivity are integral to moving cargo between inland industrial regions and maritime gateways.

That is what modern logistics is supposed to accomplish.

A factory does not have to be a neighbour of the ship.

Cargo can travel.

Containers can travel.

Raw material can travel.

Industrial products can move from an inland manufacturing site to a logistics hub, onto rail or road, and onward to a seaport.

Maharashtra already understands this principle because it is investing precisely in such infrastructure.

So why, whenever an environmentally sensitive location offers logistical convenience, should nature be expected to surrender that convenience for free?

Samruddhi Mahamarg Proves Geography Can Be Engineered

No politician understands the transformative power of connectivity better than Devendra Fadnavis.

The Samruddhi Mahamarg stretches roughly 701 km across Maharashtra, linking Nagpur towards the Mumbai metropolitan region and passing through districts including Wardha, Amravati, Washim, Buldhana, Jalna, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Ahilyanagar and Nashik. Maharashtra’s own highway authorities list the corridor at 701 km.

Why was such an extraordinary project built?

Because governments understand that geography is not destiny.

You can shorten travel time.

You can open inland districts to investment.

You can create logistics corridors.

You can connect production centres with markets.

You can make previously inconvenient locations economically attractive by bringing infrastructure to them.

That principle should transform how Maharashtra allocates industrial land.

If the state can engineer a 701-km expressway to alter Maharashtra’s economic geography, surely it can sometimes engineer another 10 or 20 kilometres of connectivity to protect an ecologically sensitive parcel.

What was the point of spending enormous sums bringing markets closer to inland Maharashtra if the state’s development philosophy still assumes industry must always occupy whichever land gives it the shortest route to existing infrastructure?

Build Connectivity to Suitable Land

This is the philosophical change Maharashtra needs.

Instead of beginning with:

“The project needs to be here, therefore whatever stands here must move.”

Begin with:

“Where can this project create the least ecological damage, and what infrastructure is required to make that location commercially viable?”

Maharashtra already builds difficult infrastructure when economic returns justify it.

It has built Samruddhi Mahamarg. It has built Atal Setu. It expands metro networks, highways and rail connectivity. JNPA is developing logistics connections specifically to move cargo between inland production centres and ports.

An additional road costs money.

A longer rail spur costs money.

A different pipeline alignment may cost money.

Moving an industrial facility farther from a port may cost money.

But destroying an ecosystem costs money too.

The difference is that the first cost appears neatly in a project spreadsheet.

The second gets distributed across everyone else through flooding risk, erosion, habitat loss, carbon loss, reduced ecological resilience and future restoration expenses.

Government accounting should stop treating nature as the one piece of infrastructure that comes free.

Not Every Project Can Move — But Many Can

There is also a danger in making the opposite mistake.

Not every project can simply be dropped onto barren land.

A port requires water of suitable depth.

A bridge connects fixed geographical points.

A pipeline has destinations it must connect.

A railway needs a workable corridor.

Some infrastructure will inevitably intersect ecologically sensitive territory.

The answer therefore cannot be “forest never.”

It should be forest last.

And different projects should face different levels of scrutiny depending on how geographically flexible they are.

A warehouse has considerably more location flexibility than a harbour.

A logistics park can often move farther than a bridge.

A manufacturing unit may have more alternatives than a transmission corridor.

And even geographically constrained infrastructure can frequently consider different alignments.

The correct principle is simple: the more environmentally sensitive the land, the stronger the government’s obligation to demonstrate that the location is genuinely necessary.

Mangroves Should Face an Even Higher Threshold

Mangroves deserve special treatment because Maharashtra possesses relatively little of them compared with its enormous geographical size.

They are not merely collections of trees occupying inconvenient coastal real estate.

Mangroves help absorb wave energy, stabilise coastlines, support fisheries and marine ecosystems, store carbon and provide natural protection against erosion and flooding.

They are, in a very real sense, infrastructure.

Except taxpayers did not have to build them.

This makes the willingness to sacrifice mangroves for comparatively tiny parcels of development particularly difficult to understand.

Maharashtra has more than 300,000 sq km of territory. A technologically sophisticated, economically powerful state should be capable of designing most development around the narrow coastal ecosystems that cannot easily be recreated elsewhere.

The question is not whether Maharashtra should sacrifice its economy for mangroves.

It is whether an economy of Maharashtra’s size and ambition genuinely cannot engineer its way around them.

That should be an embarrassing proposition for any government claiming to champion world-class infrastructure.

A Plantation Somewhere Else Does Not Recreate a Forest

The bureaucratic answer to forest diversion frequently involves compensatory afforestation.

A forest parcel disappears here; trees are planted somewhere else.

On paper, environmental arithmetic begins to look reassuring.

But ecosystems do not work like balance sheets.

Planting saplings does not immediately recreate decades of accumulated biomass, established soil systems, wildlife relationships, drainage functions or the ecological characteristics of a mature forest.

Mangroves are even more location-specific. Their ecological role arises from their relationship with tidal water, sediment, coastlines and adjoining habitats.

Compensatory afforestation has a legitimate role when damage is genuinely unavoidable.

But compensation should mitigate the unavoidable.

It should never legitimise the avoidable.

Otherwise, compensatory planting gradually becomes a licence to destroy mature ecosystems provided somebody promises enough saplings afterward.

Maharashtra Needs a “Forest Last” Policy

Instead of fighting every individual development project after it has already reached the clearance stage, Maharashtra should change the rulebook.

For major commercial and infrastructure projects, there should be a formal land hierarchy.

First preference should go to brownfield and previously industrialised sites.

Then genuinely low-ecological-value non-forest land.

Then suitable degraded or barren parcels.

Where such land lacks connectivity, the government and developer should examine what road, rail or logistics investments could make it viable.

Where linear infrastructure is involved, alternative alignments should be studied.

Project footprints should be redesigned where practical.

Only after those options have been meaningfully exhausted should forest diversion become eligible for consideration.

Not forest never.

Forest last.

That would still allow Maharashtra to build aggressively. It would simply require the state to become more intelligent about where it builds.

Make Developers Show Us the Alternatives

Fadnavis could introduce one reform that would fundamentally change this debate: a mandatory Alternative Land and Alignment Disclosure for major projects seeking forest or mangrove diversion.

Before clearance, the public should be able to see which realistic alternative sites were considered, what ecological damage each would cause, how far they are from existing highways, railway lines, ports and logistics hubs, what new connectivity would be required, and why each alternative was rejected.

Then let the government make its case.

Perhaps one project genuinely has no better route.

Perhaps another would become economically impossible if moved.

Perhaps shifting a third project would create even greater environmental damage elsewhere.

Those are legitimate arguments.

But show them.

The phrase “economically preferable” should never by itself be sufficient justification for destroying ecologically scarce land.

Fadnavis Should Apply His Own Development Philosophy to Nature

Devendra Fadnavis has built much of his political identity around infrastructure.

That is exactly why Maharashtra should expect more from him on this question.

A government capable of creating expressways across hundreds of kilometres, enormous bridges across the sea, new metro corridors and multimodal logistics networks should not behave as though a patch of forest in a project’s path presents an engineering problem beyond its imagination.

Development in Maharashtra should no longer begin with:

There are trees in the way. Get clearance.

It should begin with:

There are trees in the way. Redesign it.

Only when redesign, relocation and alternative connectivity fail should the chainsaw become part of the conversation.

Stop Asking Whether the Forest Can Legally Be Cut

The 83,700 sq ft approved for the two Adani Group projects may eventually become only another statistic buried inside Maharashtra’s enormous infrastructure story.

It should instead become an opportunity for Fadnavis to establish a better principle.

Maharashtra should stop asking merely whether a forest can legally be diverted.

It should ask why development was allowed to reach that forest before every reasonable alternative was exhausted.

Build the cement terminal.

Build the pipeline.

Build industrial corridors.

Build factories.

Build logistics parks.

Build Maharashtra into one of Asia’s great economic regions.

But build roads to suitable land before treating forests as vacant land. Build rail connectivity before assuming proximity must trump ecology. Use engineering to overcome logistical inconvenience before using environmental clearance to overcome nature.

The forest should not have to prove that it deserves to survive.

Make the developer and the government prove that there was genuinely nowhere better to go.

Mr Fadnavis, nobody is asking Maharashtra to stop building. We are asking a state that can build expressways across 700 kilometres to find a smarter answer than cutting down the forest standing in the final kilometre.