In its zeal to construct the car depot for Metro III in the ecologically sensitive Aarey Colony, the Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation (MMRC) had in the past already made misleading claims that there is no wildlife there. Now, the Metro authority has gone a step further and claimed that Aarey does not even have woods.

This has raised the hackles of activists, who see the MMRC’s statement as another effort to underplay the environmental impact that the car depot will have on Aarey’s biodiversity. It was yesterday, in a National Green Tribunal (NGT) hearing in Pune that the MMRC presented a report that reads: ‘Aarey land is not forest land as per the dictionary meaning or otherwise’ (point number 29 on page 21 of the report, of which mid-day has a copy).