Mr Subrat Ratho argues that before blaming either extreme weather or civic negligence for Mumbai’s fallen trees, the city should compare roadside trees with those in its protected forests.
Mumbai is currently engaged in one of its favourite post-disaster activities: identifying a single villain.
One group says the unusually high winds are to blame for the alarming number of mature trees uprooted over the past few days. Another insists that the real culprits are years of road concretisation around tree trunks, shrinking root zones and enthusiastic—occasionally lopsided—pruning of branches.
The debate has become familiar: nature versus negligence, climate versus civic engineering.
Each side marshals its evidence. Wind speeds are quoted. Photographs of trees imprisoned in concrete circles circulate widely. Experts appear. Non-experts appear with even greater confidence. Social media delivers its verdict several times a day.
Meanwhile, I have a simple question.
Has anyone thought of looking at the trees that were not standing on city roads?
How many mature trees were uprooted in Sanjay Gandhi National Park? What happened in Aarey Milk Colony? Or in the city’s other protected green spaces where trees, their roots and the surrounding soil have largely been left undisturbed?
Surely that comparison would tell us something.
If thousands of trees in natural forests have also been uprooted in similar proportions, then perhaps the winds really were extraordinary and no urban tree, however healthy, could reasonably have been expected to withstand them.
But if the forests remain largely intact while roadside trees have borne the brunt of the damage, then perhaps we need to ask whether years of paving, trenching, root cutting, soil compaction and excessive pruning quietly weakened many of our urban trees long before the storm arrived.
Trees are remarkable engineers.
Over decades they develop extensive root systems that spread far beyond the visible trunk. Those roots do far more than absorb water. They anchor the tree, exchange oxygen with the soil and continually adapt to their surroundings.
When we gradually replace living soil with concrete, excavate repeatedly for utilities, or reduce a balanced canopy into an asymmetrical one, we should not be surprised if the laws of physics eventually assert themselves.
None of this is to prejudge the answer.
Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent, and even healthy trees can fall under exceptional conditions.
But before the debate settles into the predictable camps of “blame the weather” versus “blame the BMC”, perhaps someone should conduct the simplest comparison of all.
Go where the trees have been left alone.
Sometimes the most valuable witness in any investigation is the one nobody thought of questioning.
In this case, it may well be the trees that are still standing.
