Puneet Paranjpe/AFP
It was an early April day in 2019 – before the past present times of the pandemic – that I went out fishing with Mangesh Sakre and his crew in the waters off Worli Koliwada, a settlement of fishers off Mumbai’s western coast.
The time between December and March is generally peak fishing season. April was still a good time to fish in Mumbai, though Koli fishers were now anxious about getting good catches on the few fishing days that remained before the monsoon arrived.
The water was a beautiful green-blue and very calm. Sakre wasn’t happy seeing it like this. “The water has changed,” Sakre told me when I asked him what he thought of his prospects that day. This colour is not so great for catching pomfret, he said.
‘Cities in water’ A transdisciplinary project looks to transform the current climate crisis into future possibilities for India’s coastal cities. A 2013 flash flood coursed through Himalayan villages in the state of Uttarakhand, killing over 6,000 people and leaving tens of thousands stranded. Scientists attributed the event to climate change a combination of heavy rain, a warm, loose groundcover of snow, and glacial instability. Here, the village of Gangotri is shown on June 13 just a few days before what was termed the “Himalayan Tsunami.” (Image: Mathur/da Cunha)
On the western edge of Mumbai, over a landscape of marshlands and mangroves, construction on an 18-mile-long coastal road snakes its way up out of the silt. The $3 billion development is one of India’s most ambitious infrastructure projects: a proposal to create land out of water, a highway on stilts over the Arabian Sea. An eight-lane freeway