The irony in the latest controversy surrounding Mumbai’s Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP), among the few such rich forests in a city anywhere in the world, is easy to miss: the government authorities that are constitutionally obliged to protect the forest, including its crucial Eco Sensitive Zones (ESZ), are the ones drafting plans for its concretisation while people of all persuasions, with meagre resources at their command, are straining every sinew to conserve the park and its ESZ. Last month, after an inexplicable delay of seven years, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) released the draft zonal master plan for the ESZ, which, in essence, opens up the buffer zone for the construction of various projects, and gave people barely a month to revert with objections and suggestion

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