The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) plans to green the city through Miyawaki forests, but ironically, it will remove more than 12,000 trees for various infrastructure projects in the coming months. While the Miyawaki forests will take some years to grow, the Tree Authority will chop 2,702 trees for the Metro III Aarey car depot, 1,510 trees for Metro VI, 1,004 trees for the Sewri Trans-Harbour Link, 631 trees for the Kurla-Vakola elevated road and other projects soon.

The Tree Authority couldn't take decisions on removing trees in the absence of tree experts from last October. Now the authority has appointed five experts, and all the pending proposals are pouring in. As per the usual practice, BMC publishes notices in newspapers about hearings for tree cuttings, and puts the report before the Tree Authority. There were 7,132 tree-removal notices published in just the two months of July and August. Before that notices about removal of 5,000 trees were published in the first six months of 2019. In all, this year, the BMC has published 12,310 tree-removal notices.