Goldin Quadros

This draft report on the study of lakes by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (India) documents the physical condition of the lakes in Mumbai. Apart from the three lakes - Tulsi, Powai and Vihar that used to provide water to Mumbai residents, there are many lakes in the Bombay Municipal Corporation jurisdiction that are either polluted by human sewage or industrial effluents and have remained neglected with increasing urbanization.

There is very little to no data available on the existence of lakes of Mumbai. Several RTI’s to the government bodies also revealed that there was a lacuna in terms of the availability of the data; as a result most of the water bodies are easily exploited. Under this study the baseline data was prepared with the help of Google Earth website. The areas appearing to be lakes were marked on the Google Earth Images. These were verified by the field staff through onsite visits. The survey was conducted during September and October, 2008 and March, 2009. The study considers only the fresh water lakes which were accessible and saline water impoundments have not been considered.