Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP) is situated in the heart of Mumbai, comprising a stretch of wild forest that breathes life into the city’s concrete sprawl. This natural green space is home to 54 leopards right next to one of the world’s most densely populated cities, making this kind of coexistence unique. As the city expands relentlessly, its edges blur with the forest. As a result, leopards wander into backyards, and people into leopard territory, giving rise to a struggle in which the presence of one poses a perceived or actual threat to the other (Gross, E., 2021). The question of ‘Not in my Backyard’ captures this tension, where both sides feel under siege, condensing into symptoms of a deeper struggle over how Mumbai chooses to address human-wildlife conflict.
With a massive population of 20 million and a population density of 28,000 people per square km, how the megapolis of Mumbai manages to find space and co-exist with its 54 leopards will have profound implications for urban conservation in India and around the world.
The article suggests us shifting away from reactive policies and a proactive governance approach that supports actionable, long-term measures to reconcile breakneck urban expansion with the compassionate conservation of Mumbai’s leopards.
Mumbai city is advancing three mega road projects: the Thane-Borivali twin tunnel, the Goregaon-Mulund Link Road, and the Western Dedicated Freight Corridor (WDFC). These projects cut directly through and beneath the park, encroaching into its already fragile ecosystem with the intention to shorten travel time by 30-50 minutes. The WDFC, a 1,500 km railway line linking Delhi to Mumbai, alone is expected to divert more than 71 hectares of forest land, including over 8 hectares inside SGNP itself.
A brief overview of all projects is visualised below
Each construction project justifies its ecological footprint as a ‘quick fix’ to ease congestion, with the hope of saving a fraction of the time travelled. This fosters a self-defeating cycle of growth, where the ‘build, and they will come’ simply invites more cars, ensuring traffic quickly returns to being just as bad or worse than before, while permanently degrading the forest. We are made to uptake this narrative and are made to believe that these ‘fixes’ are permanent solutions to urban problems.
Instead of improving public transport, the city invests crores in road-centric projects to mainly serve a small, affluent minority. By doing so, Mumbai opts for the most expensive and least sustainable route for its future development.
By offering short-term solutions to congestion, we seem to openly welcome intrusion into Mumbai’s backyards, dissolving the leopard’s habitat by pushing the burden of growth onto SGNP. The forest has become collateral damage, treated as a disposable space to be abandoned once profits dry up.
In the face of disturbance caused by unconstrained developmental pressures, the Waghoba—a guardian spirit embodied in a leopard emerges to symbolise the increasingly precarious existence of the forest. Adivasi communities, urban citizens, and environmentalists have collectively voiced the ‘Waghoba’ as Mumbai’s unique identity, recognising its value as a green lung, a biodiversity hotspot, and a space where wilderness and metropolis co-exist.
To voice the forest, some mechanisms to curb its erosion exist, but they remain reactive and short-lived, which are summarised below:
Demarcating Eco-Sensitive Zone (ESZ): In 2022, the Supreme Court ordered a one-kilometre ESZ around SGNP. However, the Maharashtra government opposed this, successfully obtaining a court clarification that exempted SGNP from the rule. Recently, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation released a draft ESZ master plan nine years late, after much of the buffer area had already been used for roads, tunnels, and private construction. Critics argue that the draft plan appears to permit development rather than prevent it by dividing the ESZ into different zones, allowing for some commercial and residential projects to be developed under managed rules.
Prey-reintroduction and relocation: Technical fixes like releasing alternate prey species and relocating leopards are underlying drivers of conflict. However, what attracts leopards to the city isn’t an absence of prey but the abundance of food. Stray dogs, waste, and landfills attract pigs, dogs, deer, and other wild prey to urban settlements (Surve et al., 2022), making foraging attractive to predators, as they are incentivised to move into the abundant ‘supply’ of food and shelter that cities offer.
Through public mobilisation, Adivasis and citizens have shown the will to defend SGNP, challenging the assumption that growth always wins. The tragedy of the commons lies not only in resource overuse but in the imbalance of power, where those who depend on the forest the most have the least say in its governance.
To fix this, there is an urgent need for an Implementation Committee to be set up. The committee will be a multi-stakeholder body empowered to legislate, coordinate, and monitor measures of coexistence. Proposed by Madhvi Mehta (2013), it calls for a political reordering, setting up an institution to include one representative each from the judiciary, home department, environment ministry, forest department, and urban development department to review laws and grievances in the shared space. The committee’s main role will be to review the forest department’s performance, streamlining responsibilities, and nudging officials to focus on achieving ‘zero negative interactions’ between humans and animals.
The intervention provides a steppingstone towards turning lofty principles into practical steps, bringing together authority, expertise, and community voices under one bureaucratic purview. Most importantly, it reframes SGNP not as collateral damage, but as ‘living commons’ that demands protection and shared responsibility.
Setting up this legal body creates a precedent for environmental policy. It challenges the ceiling of economic growth, which puts ecological systems (leopard, Adivasi, Mumbaikars) unique to Mumbai as scapegoats for ‘development’. The roles delineated by this body will allow citizens and Adivasis to hold reliable stakeholders accountable for any failure to balance the social welfare of people while maintaining the needs of animals. Such transparency is very likely to receive positive feedback from citizens as cooperation with locals increases and their value as stakeholders is realised in legislation, boosting active participation and tolerance.
Mumbai is the junction for social, economic, and cultural heterogeneity, where diversity creates the city’s identity. Our backyard visitor, the leopard, adds value as a symbol for interdependence. The leopard is the original resident of Mumbai with a claim to the city that’s stronger than most of its human inhabitants. Its survival inside one of the world’s busiest cities proves that co-existence is possible, but only if advocated for. The challenge for us is to plan our growth, share ‘our commons’ judiciously, and channel grievances through a proactive governing body.
The choice is clear; if Mumbai wants to lead the way in proving that megacities can grow without erasing the wild, the first step will be to define the fate of the Waghoba.
Sanvi Madan is an environmental enthusiast, with a keen interest in research pertaining to conservation, urban planning and geo-spatial analysis
Chaitanya Ravi teaches public policy in the Department of Social Sciences at FLAME University, Pune
Views expressed are the authors’ own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth