Three Metro Piers Planned at Edge of Basai Pond

GURUGRAM: Three piers of the Gurugram metro corridor are planned along the edge of Basai pond, needing 20.9 square metres of land, Gurugram Metro Rail Limited has said in an RTI reply, a disclosure that has set off a fight over how much of a village johad can be treated as a temporary construction site.

The reply, signed by GMRL public relations officer Mukesh Rawat on 19 August and reported in this week's civic cycle, answered an application by Aseem Takyar seeking ponds, johads, lakes, wetlands, drains and natural streams within 500 metres of the proposed alignment, stations and depot. GMRL said the three piers would be built at the pond's edge and that "only the edge of the Basai pond will be affected." It called the impact temporary and said no waterbody would be permanently affected by construction of the corridor.

The corporation said its Environmental and Social Impact Assessment looked at valued environmental components within 100 metres of the alignment and stations, and found Basai pond in that zone, along with two streams or nalas near Ashok Vihar and Cyber City. It said the metro project does not fall under the Environmental Impact Assessment Notification, 2006, and therefore does not need statutory environmental clearance, though a detailed ESIA was still done in line with usual metro practice. The reply names Basai village but does not separately mark the recorded pond area off from the land proposed for the three piers.

Environmentalist Vaishali Rana rejected the "temporary" label. "There is no such thing as temporarily affecting a waterbody," she said, asking how the edge would be protected without a buffer. Ecologist Sunil Harsan said the pond is already stressed and that work on the edge would add to that stress. Restoration, he said, does not happen on its own. The edge and the catchment, he said, are what keep a waterbody alive.

An independent seven-day assessment in May by environmental researcher Gaurav Kumar recorded six fish-mortality incidents, water temperatures up to 32.5°C and pH peaking at 9.3. Forty to 50 cattle and buffaloes enter the pond daily, the study found, and Congress grass covers an estimated 70 to 80 per cent of the perimeter. Kumar said the larger Basai wetland has already gone, leaving the village johad as one of the last open water sources in that landscape, and that birds which once had hundreds of acres now depend on this remaining patch.

Basai pond sits in a corridor that already has metro land, foot-overbridge dismantling and a history of pipeline work. GMRL's legal position is that no statutory EC is required and that 20.9 square metres at the edge is a temporary bite. The RTI file now puts that claim next to a pond that is already sewage-fed, cattle-trampled and half-covered in invasive grass. The next public number that would settle the argument is a marked map: pond boundary, pier footprints, and whatever buffer, if any, the ESIA actually drew.