Environmentalists are gearing up for another round of battle over the Metro-3 car shed project, which the new Eknath Shinde-led government in Maharashtra has proposed to move back to Mumbai’s Aarey forest, an 1,800 acre area which is often termed as the city’s ‘green lung’.
Apart from leopards, some 300 different varieties of flora and fauna are found in the Aarey forest, located in suburban Goregaon and adjacent to the Sanjay Gandhi National Park.
According to environment activists, the forest not only provides fresh air to people of the city, but it also a key habitat for the wildlife, including some endemic species. The forest has some five lakh trees, and also has a couple of rivers and some lakes flowing through it, they say.
