India, March 27 -- Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis on Wednesday cleared the Gargai water supply project inside the Tansa wildlife sanctuary for Mumbai's increasing water needs. The step will involve environmental consequences: apart from the chopping of hundreds of thousands of trees, nearly 658 hectares of forest land in the sanctuary as well as 186 hectares of private land will be submerged. The forest department representatives present at the meeting at Vidhan Bhavan objected to the project, but their protests were shot down.

The Uddhav Thackeray government had stayed the Gargai project, since it involved the chopping of so many trees, and proposed a water desalination project at Malvani instead. As per an old survey, more than 2,50,...